


waiting to turn the tide

by outwardbound93



Series: i'll keep moving (through the dark) [2]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Angst, F/M, M/M, Niall Springsteen, Niall-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-08
Updated: 2016-03-08
Packaged: 2018-05-25 06:53:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6184987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outwardbound93/pseuds/outwardbound93
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s like he’s on this side of the lake, and he wants to be on the other side, but he doesn’t know how to swim. Funny how so much of his life has started to feel that way. All that naff about making your dreams come true only makes sense while you’re still trying to make them happen, but no one ever said that when it’s over it doesn’t feel real. It feels like a dream. He can’t just start back over on the other side of the lake, back to where they still had all of it in front of them. He wants to go forward. “It wasn’t real,” Niall finally says. “It didn’t happen, me and Harry."</p><p>Or, Niall goes solo. Sort of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	waiting to turn the tide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goreallegore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goreallegore/gifts).



> as usual, a massive debt of thanks to my beta arwa, who made the photoset for this fic and has lived in this verse with me for months and months, and to the anon who prompted 'things you said after it was over.' the title is from the knocks + walk the moon's best for last.
> 
> before you read: you don't have to have read any of the other works in this series, but i recommend reading take me with you first if you have the time.

The weirdest part about having been in One Direction is that it ended. Some days – not as many now, but at least a couple of days a week – Niall still wakes up thinking that Paul’s just awoken him for bus call, that Harry and Liam will be drooping over the card tables in Sarah’s Kitchen with steaming plates full of breakfast food in front of them. It’s not as bad a feeling as it used to be, either, realizing that it’s not true. That those days are over, maybe for good.

Most days, Niall wakes up knowing full well where he is: on a rumbling tour bus trundling back and forth across America on the Moonlights’ first major tour. “Major tour,” they call it, even though the audiences he plays to now are maybe a tenth of the size of shows he’s used to putting on with One Direction. It’s nice in its way, though, to know just what he’s worth without the rest of the boys. It shows him how much exponentially more he’s worth with them.

Doing these gigs without Louis and Harry and Liam reminds Niall of the magic tricks Greg used to do when they were small. Greg never told Niall how he did it, but Niall was smart enough to know there must’ve been some trick to it. Finally, Niall grew a little older and found the tatty book that Greg learned the magic tricks from and it wasn’t disappointing to find out that magic wasn’t real. It was better than that. People made magic real. 

Niall folds his hands over his stomach and stares at the bottom of the bunk above him. The tour bus hits a bump and the light fixture above the tiny table in the kitchen swings. This tour bus is so much smaller than the one One Direction toured with; it doesn’t even have a lounge, just a three-person couch facing a tiny TV bolted to the wall. Two bunks are stacked atop each other just past the living room, and if Niall rolls out of his bunk, he’d find himself in the tiny kitchenette.

All the way back on their first tour, Harry used to talk about baking in his free time. He always said that he’d pick up flour and sugar and eggs at their next stop and make everyone a batch of cookies, but he always forgot an ingredient. So they’d have four bags of flour and three cartons of eggs and no baking powder. That was just Harry. He always meant well, he just wasn’t so good at execution.

Niall blinks, slowly, sleepily, at the bottom of the bunk not even an arm’s length over his head and tries not to remember Harry shirtless in the kitchen, standing at the hob over a sizzling skillet of eggs and sausage. Harry in the driver’s seat next to him, cranking the volume up so loud they might well be at one of their own concerts, positively _screaming_ along to Walk the Moon. Harry smiling up at Niall in his bed in the stillest small hours of the night, sliding his hands up Niall’s back to pull him closer still. Harry, Harry, Harry. His name plays over and over again in Niall’s head like a loop pedal, only he can’t just unplug it and turn it off.

The bus hits another bump and the light fixture above the table creaks even more alarmingly than before. Niall sighs and sits up in his bunk. He throws his legs over the side of the bed and shuffles to the couch in the tiny living room. The TV on the bus doesn’t get any satellite channels, so Niall kneels on the bus’s fairly questionable tan carpet and flips through the thin selection of DVDs in the milk crate tethered to the TV stand with a bike lock.

He takes out Anchorman mostly because Liam used to love this movie and presses the eject button on the front of the boxy TV. The DVD tray slides out and Niall pops the movie in. He settles back on the couch with his head propped in his hand, and in the top bunk, Cian snores.

Cian kicks his pale, skinny leg out from under the covers, and a Technicolor vision flashes across Niall’s mind’s eye: Louis sneaking up to him while he was sleeping on the tour bus on the Take Me Home Tour and tickling the bottom of his foot. Niall had flailed out so violently that he kicked a hole in the ceiling and fell out of his bunk. Paul was equal parts amused and annoyed. Niall swallows down the urge to go tickle the bottom of Cian’s foot.

Niall and Modest were pretty much agreed that he could go about his job without too much interference, but management had to give him someone to handle his radio appearances and commercial deals and all that kind of naff, so they’d saddled him with Cian. Niall reckons that Modest assigned Cian to him so that Niall could break him in, seasoned performer that he is, which is weird enough that he hasn’t really asked Cian to do too much.

The strangest part is, Niall _is_ a seasoned performer. If he really wants to break Cian in to life on the road, he’s got to give him the full popstar treatment, right? Niall clears his throat, slides off the couch, and sneaks up to Cian’s bunk.

He doesn’t freak out enough to kick the ceiling, but he does bump his head on the wall next to his bed, which is good enough. Cian just spares Niall a few choice curses and buries his head back under his pillow, so Niall returns to his spot on the couch with a smile on his face. Even though it takes him another couple of hours to fall asleep, he has to admit his life here, now, isn’t so bad. He still misses the boys and everything familiar about One Direction, but he’s making do. He just wishes it wouldn’t feel so much like making do.

***

Niall Horan and the Moonlights debuted at Los Angeles’s Grand Olympic Auditorium at the end of spring. It’s one of Niall’s favorite memories A.D., after Direction. Bobby says it’s probably not healthy to categorize his life into phases like that, but nobody who wasn’t in it understands what it was like to be right at the center of something so much bigger than yourself. Niall always thought he had such a good grip on who he was: his father’s son, a normal boy from Ireland, a guy who’d prefer to stay in and watch the telly on his days off and who still got embarrassingly excited when he met his music heroes. All those things are true but they don’t seem to be the whole truth, if that makes sense.

Most of Niall’s thoughts feel half-complete that way since the last time the band was all together at Liam’s house outside London. Even Harry, even Harry had voted yes to come back to the band, but Niall knew they weren’t ready. They spent all those years getting good at their jobs just to not be ready for it. So he knew what he needed to do, but part of him still can’t believe that he did it. And if they never come back, then it’ll have been his fault, and. And he was really looking forward to growing old with those boys, is all.

After the run of Olympic shows, Hozier and Steve and the rest of the lads went back to work with their bands while Niall nailed down Moonlight tour dates with Modest and the label. Tour proper kicked off a couple of months later, just weeks ago now. It’s all happened fairly fast, but Niall’s perspective is skewed; he doesn’t think anything will ever feel fast again after rocketing to the stars and back with One Direction. Cian keeps asking him how he’s adjusting and Niall can’t come up with any other answer than, “I don’t have to adjust.”

He does, though. He is.

The first gig without anyone he really knew was maybe the scariest thing he’s ever done except try out for the X-Factor. The gigs at the Olympic were scary, too, but Niall knew Hozier and Steve and that lot so well. They’d been friends. His very first gig back in New York at the legendary CBGB’s must’ve been close to what a gladiator felt like walking out to face the lion.

“I feel that every night,” Ed said one night over drinks. They sat up and talked for what felt like weeks before Niall signed a contract with him. The autumn Niall signed his contract, everything felt like it was falling apart. And then it had, but so slowly that it didn’t feel as much like falling apart as it did deconstructing themselves very slowly. Harry’s baleful green eyes blinked at Niall from the annals of his memory, and he’d signed the contract with only the slightest trace of guilt. He was the one who was meant to believe in the band. In whatever magic it was that held them together and kept them from falling apart under the stress. He couldn’t help feeling as though he was the first to give up on them proper.

“How’d you get past it?” Niall asked, swirling his beer around the brown bottle between his fingers and feeling half-sick. Maybe he ought to eat something, or maybe he’d eaten too much. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

Ed shrugged. “Dunno, man. I guess I, like. I didn’t look at them, really. I think about the one person I’m really out there on the stage for, and I play to them, whether they’re in the audience or not.”

“Who do you play for?” Niall asked quietly. He didn’t ask questions like that very often. You get so sick of interviewers and gossip rags and television shows prying into your private life, when your friends do it you get antsy about what they might say. Maybe that’s why Harry hardly ever said anything at all. Maybe he was afraid of hurting them. Hurting him.

Ed grinned behind his tankard. “What d’you mean, man? I’m always trying to impress myself.”

The first time Niall took to the stage with an unfamiliar bunch of musicians at his back and his guitar clutched in his sweaty hands, he’d looked out at the audience and saw the whites of their eyes. He could feel the expectation on their faces, and maybe even the hope that he would fail. People have been hoping that he and One Direction would go down in flames for so long he shouldn’t have been surprised, and maybe he wasn’t. He was just intimidated.

All the air went out of his lungs and he rocked on his heels. The rest of the band fanned out across the stage with their instruments but Niall was frozen under the spotlight at the very edge of the stage. Then past the crowd and the whites of their eyes he saw Harry in the back of the theatre, like he’d been sat in the VIP section for the first few Olympic shows. He crossed his legs and reached down to pat Rumour on the head as though this was as casual as one of the Moonlights’ first rehearsals. Niall swallowed, ducked his head, and soldiered out to the microphone at the front of the stage.

It was nothing like a One Direction gig, which is why he feels like he can call it one of his best gigs ever. People don’t come to concerts because they want to be miserable. People go to concerts because they want you to make them _not_ miserable. Funnily enough, that’s what Niall’s trying to do, too.

He strummed the guitar, the band started playing, and they got underway.

 Some shows since have been worse, few as good. Playing with a group of musicians that Niall doesn’t know very well makes it hard to ad-lib what he wants to do on stage. Sometimes the audience needs an extra little bit of involvement to put their hearts on the line, like at the show in Rochester, so Niall traded out “Somebody Else” for “Geronimo” to get everyone falling over themselves acting like they were all jumping out of an airplane together.

The best part about each show is when Niall closes his eyes for the last song in the encore and singing feels like flying, like they don’t ever have to touch ground again. If he keeps his eyes closed for an extra few seconds after the band is done playing and the lyrics have all run out, he really feels like the audience will catch him, bear him aloft. Then he opens his eyes, and they pack up to move on to the next gig.

***

Ed’s label, Gingerbread Man Records, sprang for a four-piece backing band that travels on the other tour bus and a whole host of musical instruments that’s crated from one club to another in a trailer. The whole band almost never plays together because Niall invites musical guests to come out and play with him at every gig, and he’s starting to wonder if maybe that’s part of the problem.

At last night’s gig, he wanted to go into an extended musical break so he could set his guitar aside and go for a lap around the club to try and touch hands with some of the people jammed in at the back. The band didn’t know that, though, and he hadn’t had enough time for anything more than switching his guitar.

“What you want to do, that’s, like, a jazz thing,” his bassist, Armand, says. Armand is the biggest person in the band by far, easily twice Niall’s width and three times his weight. He has a low, deep rolling voice that reminds Niall of the tour bus thundering over the road in the long hours of the night. “Improvisational, that stuff.”

“I’ve never played any kind of jazz music before,” Niall says, furrowing his brow in thought.

Armand shrugs. “You ever played ‘Fly me to the Moon’?” Surprised, Niall nods. “That’s jazz. We can rehearse later if you want, like, practice.”

“I’d love that, thanks,” Niall says. He smells the food on the waitress’s serving platter before he sees her, and then two members of the wait staff are gliding out of the kitchen on roller skates to serve them platters of eggs and bacon and hashers and pancakes and waffles. Ed’s label hadn’t sprung for any catering, so Niall and the band and Cian and the bus driver have been eating their way across America in truly inglorious style.

“This must be weird for you,” the lead guitarist, Emma, observes. If Armand’s the biggest person in the band Emma must be the smallest. She tucks a long lock of her hair behind her ear and blinks at Niall nervously.

That’s the other thing. Niall’s pretty sure she was a fan of One Direction.

Niall talks to the pendant resting at the hollow of her throat rather than her eyes because she gets nervous when he looks directly at her. “How d’you mean?”

“Touring with us,” she says quickly. “Er, I mean, and eating like this.”

“A shoestring budget,” the horn player, Sam, puts in. He has a way with words, Sam. He uses as few as possible.

Niall laughs. “Yeah, no, this is totally…it’s different, but it’s not, like. We had those nice hotel rooms, yeah? But we couldn’t ever leave them. This is so much better.”

Niall’s surprised himself at what he just said. So much better. It wasn’t a lie.

“Bet you had groupies, though,” Cian remarks, propping his chin up in his hand. “And proper showers.” He sighs gustily and his eyes, trained on the ceiling, glaze over.

Niall rolls his eyes and kicks him under the table. “Most of them were minors, idiot.”

Cian grimaces. “That’s right. I always forget you aren’t, like, old. Like thirty or something.”

The whole table laughs. Cian takes a defensive bite of his biscuit in case anyone tries to talk to him again, so Niall chuckles to himself and sets about cutting his waffle up into bite-sized pieces. He plans to dunk each little portion into the dish of maple syrup the waiter brought out. He thinks about what Cian says while he eats, though. About how he’s not as old as he thought. He’s not as old as he feels. It’s a strange realization.

When they were in the band, Niall used to spend so much time playing golf or going on safari in Africa or sightseeing trips in Jakarta or Bangkok. Louis would stumble across Harry with his chin hooked over Niall’s shoulder while Niall showed him all the pictures from his latest little adventure. “Are you coming out with me tonight?” he asked, especially just after he and El broke up and Zayn was freshly gone and it was a little like they were all shuddering apart at the seams, like the reverb from the last chord played out to nothing. Sometimes Niall said yes just to get him off his back. Sometimes he said yes just to get away from Harry, and sometimes he said no because they all knew Harry wasn’t invited.

“The old men of the band,” Niall had offered to Harry, and Harry pulled back to look Niall in the eye.

“I like it,” Harry said seriously. His eyes bored into Niall’s like he wanted to climb out of his skin and climb under Niall’s and, back then, he wouldn’t have said no. “You being like an old man, I mean. ‘Cos you’ll be doing this for the rest of your life.”

“So will you,” Niall said quietly. They must’ve been backstage and waiting for something, because Niall remembers the room bustling around them, people with clipboards and earpieces hustling around looking stressed out and harried. “Mini Mick, right?”

Harry pushed a hand through his hair and cast a thoughtless smile around the room. That used to drive Niall crazy, the way he was always trying to escape, felt like. God, and then he’d figured out that Harry was just trying to ground himself. He can still hear Harry’s voice on Niall’s front porch in LA, asking him why he hadn’t told Harry he’d come back. Niall’s seen some people get lost in this business, but not like Harry. Not so that they were hardly a person by themselves.

Niall’s phone rings on the short walk from breakfast back to the tour buses and his heart skips a beat thinking maybe it’s Harry, maybe he’s called to say – something, whatever it is Niall needs him to say. Niall himself doesn’t even know what that is. Niall glances down at his phone screen, which glints even in the beams of sunlight piercing through the veil of clouds in northern Pennsylvania.

“Bobby,” he greets his dad. “How are you?”

“Oh, same as ever,” Bobby answers. He launches into a solid fifteen-minute ramble about his regular customers, people who knew Niall’s dad before Niall was even born. He talks a little bit about Derby County’s latest season and the way the league is shaping up, and then he meanders into talk about Theo and his toddler’s golf lessons.

By the time Niall’s sat behind the table that folds out into another bed on the tour bus, he’s breathing easy. This feels like familiar territory. “I’m glad to hear from you, Da. Everything’s good?”

“‘Course it is,” Bobby just says. “Keep telling ya, you don’t have to worry about me.”

“I’m not,” Niall says, and it’s not a lie. He used to be awful worried about his da when he first left home for the X-Factor and felt like he was leaving him to his own devices, to his poor eating habits and drinking too much and never sleeping enough. Now, he knows better. You just don’t last this long without knowing how to handle yourself.

Bobby harumphs. “Have you talked to Harry?”

“Why would I talk to Harry?” Niall asks suspiciously.

“Because you were dating him,” Bobby answers blithely. No matter how many times Niall tells Bobby that they were only pretend dating, Bobby won’t listen.

Niall sighs, making sure he’s loud enough that his da can hear it.

“I’m not just asking for you,” Bobby says. “Someone should be checking on him.”

Niall chews over his bottom lip until it feels as tenderized as a good steak. It stings and tastes of blood, so Niall pops the edge of one finger into his mouth instead to start wearing away at that. “Fine,” Niall says. “I’ll give him a ring.”

“Good,” says Bobby. Niall can just about hear the smile in his voice. “Call again soon,” he adds, and rings off.

Niall puts his phone down on the cheap Formica tabletop and spins it round and around with his fingertip. The bus is quiet with just Niall and the bus driver up front quietly playing Mumford and Sons over the crackling radio. Cian must be on the other bus with the band.

Bus 1, Sam tried to call it, but Niall put a stop to that quick. He’s had enough Bus 1’s to last a lifetime, or several, really. He just doesn’t want to walk in on another band member drunk with snot and tears all over his face, trying to wash the tattoo off the side of his hand with soap and scalding hot water. Niall’s lived that through once, which is one lifetime enough. Maybe they should all be on one bus. Niall resolves to transfer over at the next stop, maybe take Armand up on his offer to teach Niall some jazz moves. For the time being, he tilts over on the tiny bench seat and watches the sky wheel by overhead. He tries very hard not to think at all.

***

Harry shuffles across the room with a mug brimming full of tea and his nose all stuffy. He carefully sets the mug on the night table and unties his dressing gown, and of course he’s totally starkers underneath. Harry lets his robe fall softly to the floor even though it’d take just one second more to hang it up on the hook over the bathroom door, and then he climbs into bed next to Niall.

“You know, it’d take one second –”

“I’m ill,” Harry says. He shuffles over and tucks his head up on Niall’s shoulder, which has the convenient side effect of clicking Niall’s jaw shut. “You can’t nag me to clean up while I’m ill, it’s against the rules.”

“You’ve allergies, pet,” Niall says. He closes his eyes to smell Harry better: coconut oil and citrus and just a hint of vanilla, like his skin absorbed some of the candle fragrance he was always burning. “Not dying.”

Harry sniffs. “I could be,” he says. He makes his voice all mopey and dramatic. “If I had myself frozen in carbonite, Niall, would you wait for me? Till they found the cure for, uh…”

“Whinitus?” Niall suggests.

Harry digs his elbow into Niall’s kidney. “Well?”

“Probably not,” Niall says, just for the way Harry tries to snort and can’t, his nose is so stuffed up. Niall tightens his arm around Harry’s shoulders and pulls them both down the mattress so that they’re laying side by side. Harry puts his face to the side of Niall’s head and bites his ear before gently tonguing all around the shell. It’s a little weird and probably gross. Niall shivers. “But if they found a cure, and I was still alive, and you still thought I was fit, I wouldn’t say no.”

Harry smooths his hand up and down Niall’s leg. Harry’s so sensitive to Niall, that’s what Louis told Niall once. That Niall was some kind of weathervane for Harry’s emotional state. Harry must be able to feel the riptide under Niall’s words, now, because he tucks his face into Niall’s shoulder, nearly purring. It’s not a matter of Niall getting over Harry while he’s trapped in carbonite. Niall can’t imagine a future where he doesn’t love Harry so much it hurts. “That’s what I like to hear,” he says softly.

***

Niall wakes up with a gasp. He sits up so fast his head spins. The light fixture overhead swings ominously and the way the light moves around the room, Niall could swear the whole world was suddenly spinning around a washing machine. He swallows and clutches his hand over his chest till reality settles in. Just a dream, it was only a dream.

Not a dream. A memory.

Niall rubs his palms over his face, and he doesn’t want to remember giving Harry a sloppy blowjob to make him feel better, doesn’t want to remember Harry’s toes curling in the sheets when he came. The way he twisted around Niall in his sleep like he was trying not to let him get away. It’s a small mercy that the dream stopped where it did, and yet.

And yet.

***

“You look dead on your feet,” Armand observes. Niall rubs a self-conscious hand over his face and settles on the heavy black drum case opposite him. All the money in the world can’t buy a good place to sit backstage while you’re killing time waiting for a show to begin. “Bit early in tour for that, innit?”

Niall laughs. “It is, it is. I’m fine. Just not sleeping well, as it were.”

“Emma says it’s probably because of the breakup,” Armand says, looking up at Niall from under his heavy brows. “You know, the boy with the long hair you were dating.”

Niall pulls an electric guitar into his lap and drags his fingers across the guitar strings. The amplifier hasn’t been turned on yet so the guitar just makes a thin, reedy, unmistakably metal sound.

God, Niall loves that sound. He used to go round to the audio mixer before shows just to ask him to turn up Sandy’s feed a little bit louder in Niall’s in-ears. Some people he’s met, like Florence Welch or even Ronnie Wood, say that the drums are the best to do that with. But for Niall, every song is built around the guitar. The drums might be thunderously loud and the very foundation of the song, and the bass guitar might put up walls and a roof, but the guitar is what fills it. Makes it whole and not empty, livable.

“He’s my friend,” Niall says, almost nonsensically. He can’t tell if he means Harry or the guitar, so he starts strumming the chords to Simon and Garfunkel’s “I am a Rock” instead.

“You did your homework,” Armand blessedly changes topics.

“I didn’t want you to think I don’t care, or that I’m wasting your time,” Niall says. He makes sure not to fidget and to look Armand in the eye when he talks, because that’s something Bobby did teach him. Always act like you know what you’re doing, even when you don’t. It gives people something to hold onto.

Armand smiles. “I know,” he says.

“So, you and Emma are friends, huh?” Niall asks.

“She is very young,” Armand says. She’s really probably not any younger than Niall, and Armand himself is maybe ten years older, max. It’s an interesting observation because Niall can never tell ages anymore. He’s met former teen stars who seem to be centuries old and ancient label execs whose emotional maturity just about broaches that of a twelve year-old’s. That was a hard lesson to learn growing up in One Direction, that not everybody ages as much as the years roll on. He’d hoped – he’d started hoping that maybe he and Harry would’ve caught up to each other, that they could’ve – but it hadn’t worked out that way, and anyway. Anyway.

Armand settles into teaching Niall some of the more jazz-oriented chord progressions. “The first real lesson you have to learn,” he explains, “is discipline. Once you know what you’re doing, you know how to break the rules.”

“I dunno, mate,” Niall says, just because he’s a little worried he’s not good enough for this. He can sing and he held up his tentpole of One Direction alright, but he’s not, like. What if he’s not good enough? Maybe the Moonlights only really works because of the rolling membership, because Niall’s friendly enough that James Bay and George Ezra sometimes pop in for a quick acoustic cover. “That’s not how footie works.”

Learning guitar the proper way, the formal way, feels a lot like becoming something or someone else. Not just the slipshod singer and performer the X-Factor plucked out of obscurity, but a real musician. He’d never say this aloud, but he might not have what it takes. ‘Course he’d put off finding out for as long as he could. And why now?, well, Niall has only to think of Harry’s face puckered in a pout under Niall’s own dark sunglasses when Niall refused to dry his blackberry and kale smoothie and he knows. He wants to be good enough.

“I am a good teacher,” Armand merely says.

And he is. He’s intense, too, asking Niall to repeat the same chords over and over again until even his calloused fingers start weeping red a little around the edges. He’s never had callouses on the sides of his fingers before; that’s a telltale mark of jazz music.

They cover The Maccabees’ “Precious Time” with Snow Patrol’s drummer that night and Niall harmonizes with Emma on background vocals to sing, “ _I’ll need heart and you’ll need courage; we all need time,_ ” and he knows it to be true.

He has a missed call from Harry when he gets back onboard the tour bus after the show and checks his phone. The two buses start up and rumble off down the long bricked-in hallway at the back of the venue to the street outside in the heart of Philadelphia, and Niall can hear the fan’s screams long after they’ve driven past.

Harry picks up on the second ring but he doesn’t say anything, he just breathes. Which is worse, somehow, because Niall’s had his cheek pressed to Harry’s bare chest on a lazy Sunday morning nap, and it sounded much like this.

“Hey,” Niall finally says. His voice comes out hoarse. Suddenly he’s excited about the party after the next show, excited at the thought of pints flowing all night and dancing and going just off in his head enough that he doesn’t have to remember every aching detail quite so clearly.

“Hey, yourself,” Harry answers. Niall imagines him slumping a little from wherever he is, maybe his house in California or his flat in New York. “What are you doing?”

“Just finished a show,” Niall says. He picks at the hem of his sweat-soaked shirt. He especially doesn’t want to remember Harry’s face when Niall told him he was touring again without One Direction. “My bassist, he’s teaching me how to play jazz.”

Harry hums. Sometimes he does that when he’s very happy, sometimes when he’s very sad. Niall wonders if it’s a bit of both. “Well, I just thought I’d call and see if you were up for a little phone sex.”

Niall blurts out a laugh. “You didn’t?”

“Maybe as, like, an added benefit. Could you get off to the dulcet tones of my voice telling you about this vegan sushi restaurant I went to the other night with Kendall?”

“Uh,” Niall thinks. “Maybe if I were hard up. No, probably not. How the hell can sushi be vegan when it’s literally raw fish, I –”

“Niall,” Harry says warmly. His voice always sounds warm to Niall, like Harry would quite happily drape himself around Niall’s shoulders like the softest cashmere sweater. Harry would, too. Maybe that’s part of the problem. “I’m not going to say I missed you.”

Niall sinks down into his bunk and rolls onto his back to stare up at the bottom of Cian’s bunk. Cian, for his part, is already going over the numbers from this show’s attendance and sales to make a report to management in the morning. Niall’s a little proud of him. It only took him four attempts at not getting that stuff done the night before to learn his lesson. “Okay,” Niall finally says. “Then I won’t say it, either.”

Harry falls silent again, but even the quiet is filled with sound. The hum of the road under the bus’s wheels, Cian’s fingers clacking away on his laptop, the creak of the overhead light like an astrolabe inside the bus, and all the things they aren’t saying, which is a noise of itself. Niall misses him fiercely.

“What are you doing?” Niall finally asks.

“Nothing,” Harry answers. “I had some drinks with my friends earlier. Now I’m home.”

"Are you lonely?” Niall asks softly. He can picture Harry sat by himself inside his massive house with the broken doorbell and the fridge whose ice dispenser is stuck on crushed.

Harry hums again, low. “No, I’ve got Rumour,” he says. “I’m sure he’d say hello if he could talk.”

“Tell him I say hello,” Niall says. His throat aches and his eyes sting and he steadfastly pretends he doesn’t know why. “Tell him I love him.”

“Will do,” Harry says. They listen to each other breathe for a moment, words on the tip of Niall’s tongue, and then Harry hangs up without saying goodbye. Niall drops his phone to his chest and turns his face to the window on the opposite wall, where he can watch the Pennsylvania sky roll by.

They cross over into New Jersey by midnight and play a gig with Roy Bittan from the E Street Band because Sam knows a guy who knows a guy who said Roy Bittan would play with them because he liked “The Sound.” Niall didn’t have the heart to tell him that was a The 1975 song, and anyway, it’s _Roy Bittan. The Professor._ You don’t just tell him he’s wrong. He’s a legend.

“Yes,” Roy says. “You’ve told me that twice now, you can let it go.” He follows this up with a laugh backstage after the gig. Niall’s hair is still sweat-soaked although he had wasted a solid minute of time with Roy to change his shirt. His skin is sticky and clammy and the air conditioning pumped into the back of the venue is too cold. Niall likes these solid, imperfect details though. They remind him this is real.

Cian and the band take one tour bus down to Atlantic City, but Niall lingers backstage with Roy. “How’d you do it?” he asks, when he’s sure it’s just the two of them. “The E Street Band, stay together, I mean. My band, we – we barely made half a decade. Didn’t, really, I suppose.”

Roy shrugs. Adults – real adults, not people who are legally adults like Niall but who don’t actually know if they’re doing the right thing most of the time – have a way of shrugging that seems more like an answer than a non-answer. Like shrugging is the nonverbal equivalent of “wait and see, you’ll find out.” Sometimes, like when Niall asked his dad why he and his mum got divorced, it was a comforting thought. Now, maybe, not so much. Luckily, Roy adds, “That’s ‘cos we didn’t, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bruce went off and did his own solo thing for,” Roy waves his hand around, “I don’t know, years, and the band separated and we all did solo projects, too. Then one day he calls us up, out of the blue, and asks, ‘Would you boys want to play together again?’ So we announced another tour and would you believe it, the tickets sold out. Sold out! At that point in our careers, and we weren’t young men then, either. But, you know, the audience was there. They waited for us. That tour ended with ten shows at Madison Square Garden and you’ve never seen anything like it, the way that those people cried for us. Blood brothers. So, you know, we didn’t make it either. We just got back together, is all,” Roy laughs.

“Thank you,” Niall says. He wishes he could say it enough, or that Roy knew how much he meant it.

Roy just grins. “Don’t thank me,” he says. “I don’t know any better than you do, honestly.”

When Niall climbs up the three steps to the bus, he finds Sam sat at the kitchen table with his sax to his lips. He finishes playing a long, low melody, and then he slowly lowers the instrument from his mouth.

“Traded berths with Cian for the night,” Sam says. “Is that alright?”

“I don’t really want to go to Atlantic City,” Niall warns him. “I was thinking maybe, maybe Asbury Park?” He’s not sure why he phrases it as a question. He’s been running rabbit for so long, making his own decisions and calling his own shots, and nothing’s exploded yet. Just, he wishes he had some way of knowing whether he was making the right call or not. Experience has taught him that you can live with the wrong decision for a long, long time. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to make the right one.

“Figured you would,” Sam smiles. “I’ll come along.”

***

Harry takes them into a steep turn onto Beverly Boulevard, so Niall tightens his arms around Harry’s stomach. Ever since they took the bike from Harry’s mansion in Beverly Hills to the end of the Pacific Coast Highway, Harry’s been more daring with Niall as his passenger. Niall thinks it might be because he can tell what Harry’s going to try to do next, so he helps to lean into turns and to pull back on him a bit when Harry slows up on the gas, obviously puzzled about where he’s driven them.   

He knows the way to the Bootleg Bar, though. It’s one of their favorite places to grab a drink and watch a show. The lights are usually turned down low enough that their faces are obscured in the dark, so no one really cares about two lads pulling up seats at a table while onstage, someone tries to break through.

Harry has something of a complex about those musicians still trying to make it. He says as much to Niall while they climb off the bike, Harry stretching his long legs high like he’s getting off a horse. It shouldn’t be hot, but, well. He’s just _really_ flexible, is all. It comes in handy. Niall stows his helmet under the seat, but Harry tucks his under his arm.

He likes walking into places with a motorcycle helmet under his arm, says he thinks it makes him look cool. Niall thinks probably it makes him feel like someone else, like Doc Holliday or someone in those Westerns they marathon from half past two in the morning till whenever Niall wakes up and turns the TV off. Like someone fearless.

Harry fluffs his curls out, one duck foot angled toward the door. He doesn’t make to move, though. He smiles at Niall, looking a little nervous. “Good?” he asks.

So Niall runs a hand through his hair himself. He shuffles around the bike to rub his thumb at the corner of Harry’s mouth, making sure no trace of their fondue dinner remains, and Harry’s eyes droop to half-mast. Niall knows he’s going to kiss him even before Harry does, probably, and then less than a second passes and Harry presses his mouth to Niall’s.

For a moment, all Niall can smell is hot cement and exhaust fumes and spilled gasoline somewhere on this car park and the faintest tint of snow in the air, even though it never snows in Southern California. Then Harry gently pulls Niall’s bottom lip into his mouth and everything else goes away. There’s just Harry’s hands on his shoulders and Niall’s arms going round Harry’s back to pull him close and the smell of Harry’s shampoo carried on a gentle breeze.

“We could go home,” Harry suggests. Niall knows he doesn’t really mean it. Harry looks forward to hanging out at seedy pubs and drinking beer with Niall more than anyone Niall knows, actually.

Niall still smiles. “Sure,” he says. “Last one there gets the other off first.”

Harry laughs. “Let’s get off in the loo,” he says. He makes no attempt to move away; his arms stay locked around Niall’s neck like they’re at that gig somewhere in the middle of tour and Harry jagger-danced right up onto Niall’s back. “Yeah?”

“We’ll get kicked out, the bouncer won’t let us come back,” Niall says. He lets out a tiny sigh when Harry noses Niall’s head back so he can press a series of featherlight kisses to his jaw and throat.

Sometimes Niall forgets they aren’t actually dating. That it’s just pretend. If it was real there wouldn’t be a deadline on this, and he’d have called Bobby the day they decided it, and Anne would’ve already invited him round for tea to give him a dressing-down about how to treat her son.

Harry drags his warm, wet mouth back up the column of Niall’s throat. Then he proceeds to attack the side of Niall’s face with his tongue.

“For Christ’s sake,” Niall says, snapping his head round so fast he almost gives himself whiplash. “What the hell, Harry?”

“You were ignoring me,” Harry answers loftily, “and your freckles look like chocolate chips.” Harry smiles wide, his perfect, gleaming teeth on display, and Niall wishes there was anything at all inauthentic about Harry.

Niall touches Harry’s dimple with his fingertip. “Nutter, you are. You’re going to get us kicked out before we even get in.”

Harry just shrugs and turns aside to let Niall match stride with him. He slides his hand into Niall’s back pocket and squeezes his arse so that Niall fumbles getting his wallet open to show the bouncer his ID, his face heating up red as a cherry tomato. Niall can’t find it in himself to ask Harry to stop, though, either, so.

Inside, the club is dim and cozy in that way that only proper hole-in-the-wall kind of places are. Everybody seems to know each other and the music always has a good beat, like a remix you’ve never heard before. Harry heads off to find them a table while Niall picks up a couple drinks at the bar, and he’s not anyone’s boyfriend, he’s never even proper done this before, but he checks on Harry while he’s waiting. Harry catches his glance and gives a little wave, and Niall, hapless to himself, to Harry, waves back.

***

Niall knows it’s a dream before he’s even fully awake, so he rolls over and tries to dream himself back into the memory before time unwinds itself to the present like a reel of film unspooling in the dark.

***

Niall can get away with doing most anything he wants without getting too much attention these days, but the Rock & Roll Tour of the Jersey Shore is still a little beyond even his powers to go unnoticed.

“We could follow along behind,” Sam suggests, looking doubtful.

Niall tugs the brim of his cap a little lower over his face. Their bus driver is taking the day off to go to spa – to be fair, it’s probably very stressful chauffeuring Niall around everywhere – so it’s just Niall and Sam alone together till Ernie, the driver, gets finished with his routine.

Niall actually recognized the name of the spa Ernie took off to, he spent so much time with Sophia and Eleanor back – er, back when the band was together, which surprised him. For some reason Niall always thinks that people can’t just quietly exit from his life without taking everything with them. But no, he still knows how Eleanor takes her tea and how much Sophia loves singing along to the Spice Girls into her hairbrush and a whole host of other things he doesn’t really have any use for anymore. It’s like he’s some kind of landlord to his heart, and he’s had so many tenants up and leave in the middle of the night without cleaning up first.

“I’ve got an idea,” Niall says. They find a Budget Rent-a-Car right off Highway 35. The car park is a slab of asphalt broken up with weeds, and of the four cars on the lot, the ancient-looking Mustang is the only one that looks remotely close to running. Niall rents it for the day for the low price of a couple of hundred dollars.

“Riding in style,” Sam observes. He slides into the passenger seat beside Niall, who pushes his sunnies up his nose and fiddles with the radio knob. Niall can’t tell if he’s joking or if he’s being serious, so he checks his expression. Sam has turned his face up to the low-hanging New Jersey sun like a sunflower chasing the last bit of light on a rainy day, and Niall smiles.

The Mustang’s engine catches the first time Niall turns it over and roars to life with a sound like a helicopter taking off, and it’s ridiculous and ostentatious and also, somehow, uniquely Jersey.

Niall’s self-guided tour runs along the lines of the “Born to Run” documentary. He watched that one with Zayn, once, in the back lounge of their opulent tour bus while the rest of the boys were out on the town. Zayn didn’t always have a lot of patience for movies that didn’t involve at least one explosion or car chase or nude scene, but he suffered through it with his head on Niall’s shoulder, so still and limp and quiet Niall kept thinking he’d fallen asleep.

They watched Jersey Boys, too, because secretly Niall always really loved musicals. He especially loved the bit at the end where all the boys in the band were proper grown-up, and they could talk about the band as people who had survived it. Surviving it; funny, how sometimes that felt like the biggest goal. Not the next award or how the next album would be received but just making it out of the band alive with his head in shape, which maybe Niall did.

He doesn’t really know. One Direction is over now and Louis’s busy with his new babies, Liam with his new girlfriend, and Zayn’s not even in the band anymore. Everything’s different, really. But Niall could go right back into it without missing a step, which makes him think that maybe he’s not really let it go yet, after all.

Niall thinks that’s what Zayn was doing with all those interviews he gave to promo his new singles, his first album. Well, first solo album. His first album was _Up All Night_ whether he wants it to be or not. Anyway. Niall didn’t watch the interviews. Not so that anybody knows he watched them, anyway, not even Harry who when he wasn’t running his hands all over Niall’s skin was passed out, catching up on five years’ worth of sleep.

This close to the coast, Niall always expects the wind to smell like beach, but this is a tourist destination, so mostly he smells carnival food like funnel cakes and hot dogs sizzling hot in the middle of summer and the searing blacktop spinning out under the Mustang’s wheels and the sweet tobacco from the Menthol Sam is smoking.

“Can I?” Niall asks, so Sam passes him his fag and sets about lighting another. It tastes like burning.

They start with Bruce’s childhood home in Freehold, New Jersey, a few miles west of Asbury Park. The house he grew up in is small and frankly unimpressive, and it reminds Niall of the house where Liam was raised. The first time Niall saw Liam’s house when they went around with the X-Factor visiting all their houses, he couldn’t believe such a big voice came out of such a little room with bunny curtains on the window.

The tree that Bruce leaned against for the Born in the USA album is still there outside a light blue house on the corner of the street, and Sam and Niall study it for a long moment with the Mustang’s engine killed.

“My mom would’ve loved this,” Sam suddenly offers.

Niall blinks, surprised. “Your mom?”

Sam nods. Neither of them have made a move to touch the tree or the house or anything, really, because it feels somehow sacrilegious to Niall. Like the early mornings he’d trot along with his little hand in his mum’s on their way to Sunday Mass, and she’d take the Eucharist off the plate for him because he was afraid of spilling it all over himself. Something like that.

Sam’s face slowly warms to a smile, and Niall realizes it’s the first time he’s seen Sam do that. His whole face creases up with it like the smile is taking over his face. Niall catches himself smiling back. “She wanted me to be the next Clarence Clemons.”

Niall shakes his head. “Sorry I’m no Bruce.”

Sam just shrugs. “I’m no Clarence.” Sam catches Niall’s eye and his smile doesn’t fade or grow self-conscious, the way Niall expects. Suddenly it doesn’t feel so much like falling short. He holds the laughter inside his chest until it hurts, and then it all bubbles out of his mouth like champagne bubbles out of the top of the bottle, and it hurts more, and less, somehow.

They stop by Long Branch and Belmar to look at another of Bruce’s house and the street that inspired the E Street Band’s name, and then they drive back toward Asbury Park proper. The carnival is open on the pier this time of the year, and by mutual agreement, Niall parks the car so they can check it out. Niall remembers the line from “The River” while they’re waiting for their funnel cakes to fry, the one about “ _Now those memories come back to haunt me / they haunt me like a curse. / Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, / or is it something worse?_ ”

And what if it _does_ come true, and it’s over now?

A couple of little girls giggle with their hands joined, swinging between them with their parents just a few steps behind. The carnival sounds of boardwalk games and attractions spitting out music older than the boardwalk itself, and Niall understands that none of it ever really ends, not Bruce’s story or his own or his band’s, ‘cos they’re all still out here living it. It’s just not a dream.

They return the rental car right before close and wait on the kerb for Ernie to pick them up. He pulls the tour bus up to the front of the rental place just fifteen minutes later, looking refreshed. “Did you have a good time?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Niall says. It’s more complicated than that, sure, but also. Maybe it’s that simple, too, if he were more black and white about things. “Yes.”

“Good,” Ernie says. The bus doors hiss shut behind them, and they rumble down the roads where Springsteen grew up, headed down to Atlantic City to rejoin the rest of their band and the tour.

***

The last gig of the American leg of the Moonlights’ first tour is played at Dublin, because Cian doesn’t know his continents.

He scowls at Niall from across the table at Nando’s. The restaurant is decorated for the holidays with wreaths and little bundles of holly that kept them at the door for ten minutes while they all tried to kiss each other and pretend they didn’t want to be kissed. The whole band is together; they try to eat at least one meal together every day they’ve got a gig, but usually they end up eating every meal together. Even Emma isn’t quite so nervous around Niall anymore, like she’s realized he’s just a normal guy.

Niall thinks he is. He feels more like one than he has in a long time, anyway, even though he still steps out onto stage with Florence Welch or The Knocks or the lovely ladies from First Aid Kit at his side. Mostly he thinks he’s too used to being part of One Direction to want the stage all to himself. It’s much more fun to play to do something different every night, like real jazz music does. Niall thinks he might even be good enough to improv soon, like Armand said he could.

It helps, too, that Sam decided to help Niall learn the harmonica. He’s been carrying around the one Harry gave him in his pocket like some kind of – memorabilia, because he can’t even think the word love token to himself, and it’s. Every time he brings it out he thinks everyone must just know, but maybe everyone is kind enough not to say anything. Some days he can’t quite bear to bring it out at all, and that goes without comment, too. They’re all dealing with something, he reckons.

He hasn’t played it on stage yet, though. Feels like he should get Harry’s permission first, before he does, for some reason.

“I know what fucking continent Dublin is on, you asshole,” Cian says. “Pass me the butter, please. It’s a homecoming gig, because you’re Irish and people eat that shit up.”

Niall frowns. Sam, Armand, and Emma all laugh. “What are you, Cian?” Emma asks. “You’re Scottish, then?”

“I would never!” Cian says, He bangs his fist on the table and his knife goes clattering to the ground, so he ducks under the table to pick it up. “I’m just saying, you lads – and Emma – are part of an Irish tribute band.”

“Tribute band?” Niall asks. That’s funny. He hasn’t thought of the Moonlights that way before.

Cian finally resurfaces from under the table with a fork clenched in his hand. When he realizes he went down for a knife, his face turns a sickly shade of pale green. They’ve visited their fair share of greasy diners on the Moonlights’ Greasy Diner Tour of America 2016, and this isn’t the seediest by far. Niall always asks for his steaks to come well done, though, just in case.

"Here,” Emma says, handing Cian her knife. He promptly drops his fork back to the ground, because he might’ve learned a few things over the last few months, but he’s still a mess of a human. Niall watches their fingers brush and Emma turns a soft shade of pink and looks away, and Niall grasps the real reason why she’s stopped being so shy around him. She’s got a crush on somebody else. It’s sickeningly cute.

Niall rang up Scott Gorham because he still has his number from the Moonlights’ first few gigs in LA, and he promised to bring along as many past and present members of Thin Lizzy as he could round up for the show. Niall forgot just how many past members of Thin Lizzy there were, so when he slips backstage from the tour bus a few hours before show starts, he’s surprised at the sheer number of older blokes with long hair and loud, unmistakably Irish laughs.

“Niall!” Scott greets him. He pushes out of the crowd of Irish blokes and presses a smacking kiss to Niall’s cheek.

Bemused, Niall rubs his cheek. “Scott, this is a lot of musicians. Are you sure – do they all know why they’re here? This is just a Moonlights show. It’s just – we’re just the Moonlights.”

Scott pats Niall’s face hard enough he feels a little bit like he’s getting slapped. “Tonight,” Scott says, “and tonight only, this is also a Thin Lizzy reunion show.”

And because Niall’s part of a band that can do shit like that, he lets Scott take stage first. The crowd positively _screams_ at his announcement, and the rest of the show goes on in total chaos. It’s unbelievably fun. The crowd screams along to their cover of “The Boys Are Back in Town,” and it must be as loud as a One Direction concert.

“Improv,” Armand winks on a quick trip to the side of the stage to swap out their instruments, and Niall laughs.

His family is in the audience tonight, too. Bobby and Maura and her husband and Greg and Denise and even little Theo, who’s sat on Bobby’s shoulders with a set of headphones over his little ears. He’s three years old now. Niall can hardly believe it.

“Did you like the show?” he asks, when they’ve done with the encore and the audience is filtering out slowly, still chorusing “The Boys Are Back in Town” like a loop pedal left on and on and on.

Theo tilts his head in thought. “Yeah,” he finally says.

Niall crouches down to his level because he’s three years old now, and he doesn’t like to be held anymore. “Do you want to come up on stage with me sometime?” he asks. “You can be our special guest.”

Theo positively beams. It makes the way Greg scowls totally worth it.

Niall has houses in London and in Ireland, but he decides to stay at Bobby’s for the holidays. There’s something daunting and horrible about staying by himself in his own quiet, cold flat after spending the better part of the last six months with his very loud band and very loud crowds.

“Glad you’re coming with me,” Bobby weighs in gruffly. “Missed having you around. Thought with One Direction on break I’d see you more, and instead –”

Niall tips his head back against the seat and closes his eyes. Theo snores quietly in the backseat because he said “please” when he asked his mum could he spend the night at grandpa’s. He’s still tiny enough that he’s sat in a car seat, and his little legs have years to go before his feet touch the floorboards.  “I’m sorry,” Niall says. “I – It’s not you, I just…”

Bobby draws the car to a slow, safe stop at a red light. “Did Harry really do that big a number on your head?”

Niall snaps his head around. “What? Bob, you know that – that that wasn’t real, right? It was just an accident; it wasn’t…” It wasn’t for keeps. It wasn’t something Niall could actually ever have, just something he could be teased with.

Bobby merely peers at Niall over the top of his glasses. “I don’t mean to offend you, son, but you’ve been running around like a boy with a broken heart.”

Niall folds his arms over his chest.

“So has Harry,” Bobby adds thoughtfully. Niall starts picking at a hole in the knee of his jeans. He hasn’t talked to Harry, really. Sometimes he’ll still call or Harry will ring him up in the middle of the night, but they never talk for long. It’s usually just, “Are you okay? How’s Rumour?” and then one or the other of them ringing off like they’ve done something wrong.

Maybe they have.

“Harry’s been getting around fine,” Niall says, because that’s one thing he knows to be true. Harry always thinks he can patch up his broken heart by filling it with more people to love, and even though he’s gotten better at keeping it out of the papers, Niall knows that Harry’s biggest tell is his silence.

“Maybe it’s time you start to move on,” Bobby says quietly. It’s been just over a year now since…well, it’s almost a year till Niall kissed Harry in front of the whole world at Rockin’ Eve.

“Maybe,” Niall just says.

***

Niall stumbles into Harry’s room with Harry’s mouth on the back of his neck, his arm curled around Niall’s waist. He almost goes ass over teakettle tripping over one of Harry’s boots left out in the middle of the floor. “How many times do I –” he starts, and Harry shushes him.

“We’re getting in the mood,” says Harry, who Niall is pretty sure is never _not_ in the mood. One of the best things about getting off with a boy all the time is that Niall isn’t, really, either. Not for Harry, anyway.

“It’d take less than a minute to put them away,” he says, just for the way Harry nips at the tender spot behind his ear.

Harry drags his hand down Niall’s stomach, and then he pushes his hand up under the hem of his shirt, his palm cool against Niall’s feverish skin. “Minute wasted,” Harry grumbles. Niall reaches back to squeeze Harry’s soft hip. If they were a more coordinated couple, he might try hitching Harry’s leg up, kick his feet out wider so Niall could grind his ass against Harry’s crotch. As it is, he knows they’d probably both fall over.

“Harry,” Niall says, soft.

Harry nods against Niall’s shoulder, and then he peels himself off Niall’s back. “You get your kit off,” he instructs. “I’m going to light some candles.”

“Not the tropical one this time,” Niall puts in. He gets tangled in his button-up shirt trying to pull it off over his head, so he lets it drop back down and struggles with the buttons. Niall can smell the candle burning as soon as Harry lights the wick, or maybe it’s just that he’s one of them Pavlovian dogs, always smells vanilla when he gets worked up now. Niall assumes Harry’s taking his clothes off, too, until he feels his hands on the backs of his legs.

“I love these beanpoles you call legs,” Harry says, nuzzling his face into the back of Niall’s thigh. He’s still wearing jeans but Christ, how he wishes he wasn’t. Harry skates his hands all the way up the line of Niall’s legs, over his arse, then round his hips to pop the button on his jeans and unzip his flies. Then Harry’s fingers clench around the meaty part of his skinny legs, and Niall has to put a hand out to steady himself on the bed frame.

“I used to, like,” Harry says. “I used to think about them, like, wrapped around my waist all the time.” He gives a little self-conscious laugh; Niall looks over his shoulder to catch the nervous glance Harry shoots him.

Niall takes a deep, rattling breath. “We can,” he finds himself saying. “Like that, if you want. I trust you.”

Harry shakes his head. He does that sometimes, asks for things without asking for them and gently turns them down when he gets them. Niall’s still not sure why that is.

Niall turns around carefully, and Harry teases his fingers up the hem of Niall’s skinny jeans. He wraps his long fingers around Niall’s bony ankle and it’s weird, it’s not even, like, a sexy part of him, but Niall’s breath catches in his chest. Harry uncurls his fingers around Niall’s ankles and runs his palms up Niall’s thighs, the tips of his fingers just brushing against his flies. Harry kisses the scar on Niall’s knee through the rend in his jeans, his fingers digging into Niall’s thighs.

Sex with Harry is slow and meandering as often as it’s fast and desperate, so Niall ignores the urge to get a hand on himself, or something, anything to take the edge off. Being patient is tortuous but it’s so, so much better to wait. Harry’ll get around to getting him off on his own time the way he wants, and he returns Niall’s little gestures of trust so enthusiastically. Makes Harry happy. So Niall waits.

“Harry,” Niall murmurs.

“Sit down, yeah?” Harry answers, his rocky voice low and hoarse. So Niall backs up till his knees hit the mattress, and then he sits down. Harry tucks his fingers inside the holes in Niall’s jeans – Jesus, why is he even still wearing these – and spreads Niall’s knees a little wider, a shiver crawling up Niall’s spine. Harry nuzzles his face into the vee of Niall’s hip, his hands still smoothing over Niall’s legs.

“Harry,” Niall says again, soft, like his brain’s forgotten every other word it knows. Harry was in such a rush when they get home from dinner, but now he just cradles Niall’s face between his hands and kisses him slow, like he could kiss him forever. “I know, I know,” Niall mutters, not even sure what he’s saying. “Me too.”

Harry lets out a shuddery little laugh, and then he hooks his fingers into the waistband of Niall’s trousers, so Niall leans back on his elbows and lifts his hips off the bed. Harry drags his jeans and pants down his thighs enough to get his dick out, and then he shuffles forward on his knees. Niall squeezes Harry’s ribs with his knees, and Harry laughs for real this time, so Niall lets him go.

He bends his head into Niall’s lap and sucks him down, the familiar wet heat of his mouth so good that Niall forgets himself for a moment and lets his hips twitch off the bed. Harry makes a quiet sound but doesn’t pull off, so Niall threads his fingers through his hair and scritches along his scalp, pulling a little the way he knows Harry likes. Harry groans, sinking deeper, and it gets harder and harder for Niall to think.

“I used to think about this,” Niall confesses. “You and that mouth, and the way you’d smile – I dunno.” He tries to concentrate, only vaguely aware of Harry pressing the heel of his hand to his own dick or the way he’s almost deep-throating him. “Used to – ah –” he tugs Harry’s hair sharply, and Harry actually moans “- think about it in my hotel room. Wank off thinking about it with you just on the other side of the door, Jesus I was scared you’d find out.” Niall blinks hazily up at the ceiling. “I wanted you to find out so bad.”

Harry pulls off, and Niall wonders, distantly, where he’s gone. Then he hears Harry’s belt hit the floor and Harry’s climbing into his lap, straddling his hips. He must’ve forgotten to take his shirt off, so Niall can see wide swaths of Harry’s tattooed chest when he leans forward to brace himself with his elbows on either side of Niall’s head.

“Oh,” Niall says, ‘cos he thinks he gets it now. His brain finally remembers how to do his legs, so Niall tucks his knees up around Harry’s waist. Harry drops his hips down and thrusts against Niall like there’s anywhere for his dick to go with their jeans still on, and Niall lets his head hit the duvet, fireworks going off behind his eyelids. “C’mon, Harry, put your back into it,” Niall mumbles, and even he’s surprised at how ragged his voice sounds.

Harry works his hips hard and fast, and it’s too much to think about right now, with no blood left in his brain and Harry’s fingers undoubtedly leaving bruises curled around his shoulders. Harry’s curls keep brushing against Niall’s cheek and his eyes are squeezed shut, his bottom lip caught between his teeth.

Unbidden, Niall pictures Harry beneath him, his face twisted up the same way when Niall pushes in, and Niall comes with no warning at all. Harry’s jeans are filthy between them with precome and now come, and that does it for Harry, who drops his forehead to Niall’s shoulder and shudders till he stops.

After a long, long moment Harry sits back up. He draws Niall’s knee up and bends his mouth to it in a lingering kiss, till Niall finds a laugh rattling in the bottom of his ribcage. He grabs a handful of Harry’s now-stained shirt and pulls him down for a kiss. It’s sloppy and uncoordinated because so are they, and Harry’s drool on his chin is a little gross, but it’s them.

“Can I take a picture of you?” Harry asks.

“Sure,” Niall says, because he’s had his picture taken maybe ten million times in the last five years, what does one more matter? Harry throws his giraffe legs over the side of the bed and wobbles unsteadily over to the shelf of cameras above his desk. “Wait, _now?_ ”

Harry fidgets with the old film camera in his hands. “Yes?” he bites his lip. “I won’t share it with anyone. I promise.”

“It’s just for your wank bank?” Niall checks. He knows he’s going to say yes. He already did, after all. Harry shrugs, so Niall nods, then grimaces. “Quick, then, yeah? I want to take a shower before this dries on.”

But it’s Harry, so he takes his sweet fumbling time to crawl up Niall’s body and adjust the shot the way he wants. Harry frowns, and Niall asks, “What’s the matter?”

“Just need a little touch-up,” Harry says, in his terrible impersonation of an American accent. He looks a wreck, Harry, with his silky shirt sticking to him and his hair a mess, red marks on his jaw and the side of his neck from Niall. He’s never looked quite so much like the version of himself that lives in Niall’s heart.

Niall’s mid-laugh when Harry kisses him again, nibbling hard on his bottom lip so that it looks red and swollen. Harry takes the picture, and then he puts the camera aside and threads his fingers through Niall’s hair. The kiss turns deep and languid, and it lasts for so long that Niall thinks he might never let go.

***

Niall wakes up crying in his tiny bed in his father’s house. It takes him a very, very long time to go back to sleep.

***

Bobby’s clattering around the kitchen with pots and pans on the stove and the teakettle hissing when Niall wakes up. He lays in bed for a moment just to listen to Bob’s familiar, drawling voice talk to the baby about how to make a proper fry-up. It’s good Bobby teaches Theo stuff like that. He might not learn it otherwise.

Niall throws his legs over the side of the bed and looks around his old room. It hasn’t been preserved in amber the way Harry’s room seemed to be, or Louis’s would’ve been if he hadn’t had all those younger siblings growing into all the empty spaces of his childhood home.

It’s a good thing that Bobby has made Niall’s room into something of a storage room, and he’s rearranged things to get rid of the desk he had when he was small so that he can fit in the set of golf clubs that Niall got him for Christmas last year and the figurine of his da’s favorite Derby player he got him the year before that.

Niall always hated the thought that him leaving left some kind of hole in his family, even though he’d hoped that him being on X-Factor might give them a reason to spend more time together. It had, for a while, and then Niall not being there became the norm, and now Greg takes to Twitter every few months to blame Niall for everything that’s ever gone wrong in his life. AT this point Niall’s not sure if he ignores it to be kind or just to annoy Greg more. Maybe a little bit of both.

“Water’s still hot,” Bobby tells Niall. Niall shuffles across the living room and pads into the kitchen, where Theo’s sat at the kitchen table drawing all over his arms with Magic Markers.

“What are you drawing there, champ?” Niall asks, dropping a kiss to the top of his head before he grabs a mug from the overhead cabinet.

The eggs and sausages sizzling on the hob smell amazing, like home, and Niall’s bad mood dissipates a little. He hadn’t bothered to put on a shirt because it’s just the lads about the house, but when Niall twitches back the curtains to peek out onto the back garden, he shivers. A layer of frost has settled over everything in the night and the world outside looks brittle and frigid and icily perfect, like Sophia when she’d be in a row with Liam.

Theo answers, “Jus’ colorin’.” He drops off the ends of his words like a proper Irishman, and Niall can’t help but smile at him when he drops into the chair beside Theo’s. “You wanna color?”

So Niall accepts the purple marker from his nephew’s hand and pushes Theo’s sleeve up to draw a little peace sign at the top of his shoulder. “No, Ni,” Theo says, with infinite patience, “you draw on you.”

Niall draws up short. One of the major reasons he’s never had a tattoo is because he doesn’t really – all the other lads could think of pictures to remind them of people or places or things they wanted to remember, but nothing is ever that small or simple for Niall. Everything comes attached. Feeling a little inane, he copies the ink Louis gave him, once, and draws over the scar cutting down the middle of his knee. He adds arrows on either end.

“Like a zipper?” Theo asks. He has a speck of blue marker ink on the side of his mouth and his glasses are askew on his little face, and Niall couldn’t tell him no if he wanted. “Sick.”

“Sick?” Niall laughs. “Where did you learn that word?”

“From me,” Bobby says. “I’m hip with the laddy lingo these days. Wotcher.” He carries the pan of eggs over to the table and Niall hastily draws their plates over and separates them so Bobby can dole out fried eggs to each of them. “Do you need help cutting your eggs, Theo?”

“I’ll do it,” Niall volunteers. Theo watches him intently, he’s such a smart little lad, and Niall curves his hand around the little boy’s cheek before he can think too hard about it. He casts about for something Louis might say. “Did you know an ostrich laid these eggs?”

Theo narrows his eyes. “It did not,” he hedges.

Niall makes his face as serious as he can, but Bobby makes a curious little noise and Niall breaks and starts smiling.

"I bet ostrich eggs would be good,” Theo volunteers, clumsily spearing a piece of egg into his mouth. “Don’t ya think, Uncle Niall?”

“The best,” Niall agrees, and they segue easily into a conversation about Theo’s favorite animal, and his favorite dessert, and his favorite TV show on the children’s channel.

Niall cleans up breakfast when they’re all done eating. Theo wanders off to play with his Duplo blocks in the other guest room, but Bobby stays sat at the table. “You’re good with him,” he compliments Niall.

Niall concentrates on scrubbing the grease off of the frying pans. “Thanks, yeah, uh – you know, you learn a lot with Lux and Brooklyn on tour with us all that time. Learn a lot about kids.”

“You think about having any of your own?” Bobby asks.

His grip on the frying pan slips and it plops into the sink, sending a wave of soapy water washing down the front of Niall’s trackies. “Damn,” he murmurs.

“Because with you and the boys on break,” Bobby continues placidly, “it’s a good time to think about it. Or whatever you want from life, you know, there’s more to it than playing shows and having a good time.”

Niall’s voice comes out harsher than he means it to when he says, “I know that.” He clears his throat. “I mean, I know. I’ve, like. Learned that, I know.”

Bobby nods. He folds his hands together in his lap, hands that’ve been steadily carving slabs of meat into the same reliable job for the past ten years. Niall’s always wanted to be a man like that. Steady, dependable, the kind of man that the community acknowledges with a nod on their way to the market. Doing the pop star thing came later, but there was always that beneath it.

Harry read a poem to him once – he was always reading bits and bobs he’d copied into his journals, some of it original, some of it things he’d picked up, like a magpie building a nest out of the scraps of those little books he was always toting around – and it ran,

_So this is the house where love lives,_

_A tin shed in a windstorm,_

_Tin shed at the sea’s edge, the land’s edge,_

_Waters wild and steady, wild and steady, wild._

For a long time, Niall thought it was possible to be both, and then for a little while he’d started to wonder if maybe he didn’t have to be. That those two things – wild and steady – were things that lived together in the house on the edge of the sea, as in different people. He honestly thought that maybe the trick was having someone to share the turbulence with. And it’s. If Niall’s learned anything from spending almost a quarter of his life in One Direction, it’s that the people around you are sometimes the only things steady when everything else has turned upside down. He wants that.

“I want to,” Niall finally says. “I want those things, and that, Bob, I do.”

Bobby nods. “Good. That you know what you want, I mean. It can’t be all pop star all the time, can it?”

Niall, shirtless in his dad’s house with soapy water all down the front of his trousers and a pimple coming up on his forehead, just laughs. Niall gets it, though. He bought that house in London thinking he’d build a life to live in it. He should get started on that.

Eoghan has Niall back round for his radio show while Niall’s in town on break from tour for the holidays, and it’s just as easy and fun as it ever was to sit around with one of his best mates and shoot the bull. Used to be, Niall would get so, so nervous before he went on air. He thought he might puke. Somehow it’s easier when it’s just him, even though normally the boys in the band were like a security blanket. Like it’s all on him if he fucks up, which is alright. It was worrying about fucking things up for them that made him want to spontaneously combust and die a painful death.

“So, tell us, Nialler,” Eoghan leans in close to the microphone. “You and the One Direction boys are on break, you and Harry are on break, I assume, and you’re on a sold-out tour for your first solo effort. How does that feel?”

Niall pauses for so long that he sees Eoghan’s eyes wrinkle up, and he knows he’s about to ask another question or rephrase it, so he just starts talking. “You know, like, the first time your ma sends you to the store with a couple of quid to buy a loaf of bread or something? Or the first time your dad loans you the keys to the truck, and you’re not even going so far away. You could walk just as easy, and the grocer’s is, you know,” Niall gestures vaguely, “a block down the road. But it feels like everything, ‘cos they trust you to do it?”

Eoghan’s started smiling. “It feels like that?”

Niall laughs. “Christ, no. I mean, yes, but,” Niall tries to wrestle his voice down so he doesn’t sound so hysterical. “No, it is like that.”

“So, what’s this loaf of bread you’re bringing home, eh?” Eoghan asks. He wheels himself back and forth behind his mic, his oversized headphones slipping a little round his head. “An album, maybe?”

Niall shouldn’t be surprised, but somehow he is. The tour’s really been doing well and they’ve got enough staple covers, him and Emma and Armand and Sam. He even, well. Sometimes musicians stick around after a gig, and they jam out, and maybe Niall’s got a little original material from that. But that’d be. It’d be, like, true, proper solo stuff. Niall couldn’t record any of it without checking with the boys first, he thinks.

He adds it to his list of things to do.

Eoghan and Niall go out for drinks after the show. Niall drove himself from Mullingar to Dublin so he’s not planning on drinking very much. He has plans to go Christmas shopping with Theo and Bobby tomorrow, and then maybe tea with Denise. Even a band that’s not One Direction doesn’t have all the time in the world off work, but he has enough. It’ll be the first Christmas that he’s home for his nan’s bread pudding since the band started, and he’s almost a little too excited for it.

His nan would just sniff, anyway, and say, “It’s just the best way to get rid of stale bread, little lad, now go and do something useful.”

Niall’s missed her so much.

Nan calling him little lad reminds Niall of Louis and his little lad, now, and he makes a mental note to check in with him soon, too. It’s strange to think about the stretch of time at the end of this tour, when he doesn’t yet know what he’ll be doing.

When One Direction was going on break he’d already had the Moonlights lined up and now, he thinks he might actually be able to sit around in his pants for a few weeks watching telly and going to the gym. And maybe record an album, if that seems alright. Niall doesn’t think he’d have been able to go from flying above the clouds to a life that allowed for holiday time and time to see his family and – and time to have a life, really. He’s still learning how to have one, but. Like. It seems plausible now. He doesn’t have to worry about ruining the other boys’ lives anymore. He’s not trying to take over the world. He’s just trying to make a space for himself in it.

“Sorry about bringing up Harry,” Eoghan tells Niall, loudly, in their booth at the pub. They both ordered burgers and chips and half a tankard of ale for Eoghan, who’s been putting it away like a squirrel storing nuts for winter. “I know, like,” he hiccups. “I just didn’t want someone else doing it that you didn’t know and being bad to you, mate. ‘Cos I know you and I love you, and you don’t deserve that.”

Niall puts his hand on the back of Eoghan’s neck and Eoghan positively cheeses at him. “It’s alright,” Niall murmurs.

“Because it wasn’t pretend, was it?” Eoghan murmurs. He props his cheek up in his hand and looks at Niall through his lowered lashes. Niall went home from the last few promo gigs before Christmas last year and told all the boys that he and Harry were just a PR stunt. That they’d gotten mixed up outside a club and kissed, and they couldn’t very well break up in the middle of the band going on break. He’s only realizing, now, how little sense that makes. Why would he have kissed Harry in the first place?

Niall drags Eoghan in with the hand on the back of his neck till their foreheads bump together. “Shh,” Niall says, and pats him on the cheek. He lets Eoghan go, who reels back with a laugh. “It’s over now, anyway.”

Eoghan just shakes his head, and then he grabs another bottle of beer from the table and knocks it back. “As long as you’re happy,” Eoghan says.

Niall drives all the way home to Mullingar chewing the inside of his cheek and his cuticles. He rings up Sam, first, when he’s sat outside his childhood home in the BMW he keeps here in Ireland. He has one nice car per place that he frequents, which is a little ridiculous and opulent but he’s not Liam, at least, he doesn’t have a million-dollar car in every city he’s ever been.

Sam picks up the phone and a load of little girls’ laughter comes tumbling down the line. “Hello?” Sam asks, his big voice filling the whole car. “Who’s it?” Niall gives Sam his name, and Sam laughs. “Niall, of course, sorry mate. The girls have me decorating gingerbread cookies with them tonight.”

Niall sinks down a little behind the wheel. He can just picture Sam’s huge hands very carefully spreading a thin stream of icing round the edges of the cookie, painting in buttons for the gingerbread man’s coat and drawing him a face. Niall hasn’t met Sam’s two daughters, Nicola and Simone, yet. But Sam’s shown him pictures. Both are beautiful little girls who smiled so wide, it’d seemed like nothing bad had happened to them yet. Niall reckons Sam’s probably a pretty good dad.

He – it’s not that he wants to settle down and get married right this minute, but he’s always thought, someday, that might be him. He’d be a dad like Bobby and be there for all the important things, but he’d be like Robin or Geoff, too, and not miss any unimportant things, either. Niall would know what his kids’ favorite flavors of ice cream were and how they liked to be tucked in, because he remembers how important it is to kids that their dad remembers.

It’s funny, now, how far away a perfectly ordinary dream feels, now that he’s come such a long way to making another dream come true.

“We’re having a dance party later,” Sam says in his slow, serious voice. “To Carly Rae Jepsen.”

Niall laughs out loud. “Film that for me, won’t you?”

Sam just snorts. “If you’d like,” he starts, sounding a little uncertain, “you’re welcome to come for tea one day. You don’t have to call ahead. You can just drop by.”

Niall stays quiet, because – people don’t really make offers like that to him. Like, of course he’s got mates who invite him places or to do things but no one…you don’t really hang around your mates’ houses, that Niall knows of. Not in this world. But maybe you do in real peoples’. Normal peoples’. “Okay,” says Niall. “Yeah? I’d love to.”

A smile in his voice, Sam says, “Alright, then. Just drop by. Is that the only reason you called?”

“Yeah, you know. Just checking in.”

“We’ll be ready to go back on the road after this,” Sam observes. “The girls seem to think I’m too thin, but I don’t think my trousers will fit after too much more of this.”

Niall bites his lip. “Do you think we could make an album? Like, the others – I’m sure they’d say yes, but like. You know what that takes, and. Whether anyone would listen.” Niall hears himself laugh nervously; it hurts his chest coming out. “Please don’t tell Cian or Armand or Emma I said that.”

Sam heaves a deep, deep breath. “I was a solo artist before this,” he starts, “and I did a couple of studio albums, some studio sessions for other musicians. It gets exhausting performing like that. Like you’re just some piece of a machine.”

Niall’s made a lot of jokes about being his own version of Florence and the Machine, but, “I never meant to say –”

“I know,” Sam cuts him off swiftly. “Let’s just do this one for ourselves, then, eh?”

Niall closes his eyes. “Thanks, Sam.”

Sam answers, “Of course, boss. Drop by anytime, remember. You don’t have to call. Good night.”

“Good night.”

Crickets chirp outside, and the stars are so bright in the cloudless sky. Niall read this story by James Joyce in secondary school, before he dropped out to join One Direction, and he thinks of it while he’s sat in the driver’s seat of his luxury car in the driveway to his dad’s old three-bedroom house with the chipped paint and the lines on the doorframe measuring his and Greg’s heights as they grew up.

The story had it so that this couple, who weren’t so fond of each other anymore, were sat in a hotel room together while snow broke all across Ireland for the first time in a hundred years. Snow all over the country, that never happens. And it covered the whole country with a blanket of white, and it might’ve been a death, or it might’ve meant new life. Niall thinks maybe it was just burying what was already dead, so they could move on.

He rings Harry.

“Whozzit?” Harry slurs. “Hello?”

“It’s Niall, mate,” Niall answers. He picks at the hole in the knee of his jeans. “You pissed, mate?”

“No,” Harry sniffs. “I’m sober as a fox. Me and my friends –” Niall hears smothered laughter in the background, “- we’re just having a little party, how are you?”

Niall swallows. “Good, yeah. At me dad’s.”

“Oh,” says Harry. His voice sounds like a deflated balloon, and Niall can imagine him in the middle of some club or fancy restaurant because of his friends asked him to come, and Harry can’t say no, even though he’ll only have been invited for all the press. Niall wants to tell him, “You don’t have to try so hard to be loved,” but that’s not his place anymore. If it ever was. Niall closes his eyes and tries not to imagine Harry hunched over his phone, his shoulders drawn up as if to make himself look smaller. “Bobby. Tell Bobby – tell Bobby –”

“I will,” Niall murmurs. “Theo, too. Got him a firetruck with your name on.”

“Niall,” Harry’s voice breaks.

Niall clears his throat. “I know it’s a bad time. I’ll call back later. Sorry, Harry. I’m really – I’m really sorry.”

“You know how you said to me,” Harry starts, “how you said, ‘Sometimes I wish I loved you a little less’?”

Niall tips his head back and looks up at the cloudless sky through the sunroof. His legs are starting to cramp from having been sat in this car so long and his ears ring with all the noise he’s not hearing, for once. Yeah, Niall remembers. “I love you so much, and there’s nothing I can do about it,” he’d told Harry.

Harry swallows audibly. “I get that now. God, I wish I didn’t love you, you know? I can’t use the bathroom in my house because you’re _there_ every time I turn my back, and I,” Harry hiccups. “I can’t go to my favorite restaurant or my favorite club or talk to my mum, because she knows I fucked up, and I just.” Harry’s voice cracks on a sob. “I don’t want to feel like this anymore.”

Niall draws his knees up to his chest and puts his forehead down on the ridged scar. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, I’m sorry, I –”

Harry admits, “I liked it better when you weren’t,” and then he hangs up.

Niall clambers up to stand on the top of the backseat of his car, so he’s hanging out of the sunroof. He throws his phone as far as he can, and it lands somewhere in the marshy fens behind his dad’s house. Then Niall starts the car, closes the sun roof, and goes inside.

Bobby is sat at the kitchen table with a heap of coins in front of him. He takes one look at Niall’s face and says, “Help me sort these,” so Niall draws up a seat at the table and helps his da organize his coin collection until he doesn’t think he’ll shake apart at the seams.

He doesn’t dare call Harry again for a long, long time.

***

Greg and Denise take Theo and Niall out for lunch on Boxing Day. Greg’s in good form, today, or otherwise Niall might’ve found some reason to escape, but it’s always nice to see Denise again. She always smells like breakfast tea and she’s such a good mum to Theo, who only experimentally disobeys her when he gets properly bored. Niall used to wish that Denise was his sister and Greg just his brother-in-law, but now he thinks he understands the attraction. To Denise, he means. It’d be nice, like, to have someone who quietly went on with life and supported you whether you’d made an ass of yourself or not. Who liked you alright either way.

Niall stabs at the broccoli on his plate and thinks about going for a drive today to visit Sean or some of the other hometown lads before he heads back out again. He’s got a few days left in town and then tour starts up again on the European leg, first a show in Germany then France and then it’s eastward from there. They’re saving the UK for last because they’re hoping to break it with their first few shows. It’d be quite a coup. Sam and Armand think they can do it.

“Theo,” Denise is saying, “try and use your fork with your peas, I know it’s hard, love. Here, let me give you a spoon. Oh! Dear, is that Aisling? Aisling!” Denise doesn’t wait for Greg to answer either way before she waves someone over.

The bird is about a head shorter than Niall with a head of dark, thick hair, and these smiling red lips. She reminds Niall of a song. “ _In a little while, I won’t be blown by every breeze_ ,” something like that, for some reason.

Niall adjusts the brim of his snapback while Denise introduces them. He holds out his hand to shake and Aisling squeezes his palm in a solid grip, her eyes not flinching from his. “This is my husband’s brother, Niall, and Niall, this is Aisling. Remember Ears, Theo’s rabbit? She’s the vet who – who, ah, took Ears to the farm.” Denise casts a nervous eye at Theo, who’s not even listening.

Niall can’t quite stop himself from smiling, and Aisling smiles right back. “I thought I knew everyone in this town,” Niall says.

“Apparently not,” Aisling shrugs.

“We should get lunch sometime,” Denise starts, so Niall fusses with the straw in his water glass and tries to be subtle about watching them out of the corner of his eye. Aisling neatly tucks a lock of hair behind her ear and shifts her weight, and she wiggles her fingers at Theo when he tests out the fabric of her skirt against his tiny fingertips. “Great, can’t wait,” Denise says.

Greg’s sat back in his chair with his arms crossed. “Can’t leave the house without one of you making a friend, can I?” he asks.

Denise takes a neat sip of her tea. “Afraid not,” she answers, and Greg sets about helping Theo peel his straw wrapper off his straw.

Niall doesn’t think any more of it until Denise rings him up on Bobby’s house phone while they’re watching a match. “I can’t make it to lunch today, Theo threw up in bed this morning,” she says, which, ew. “Would you mind meeting Aisling for me instead? Thanks, hon, love you lots. Bye-bye.”

Niall’s been a celebrity for a decent portion of his life now, and he knows how not to be manipulated by people. Somehow his sister-in-law just flipped him around like the way she changed Theo’s dirty nappies and pulled his trousers up his chubby baby legs till he popped off the changing table and onto his feet.

“I guess I’m going to lunch,” Niall says bemusedly. “Want me to bring you back anything?”

Bobby waves him off. “I’ll have a nap. Be a good lad, eh?” He musses Niall’s hair on his way by.  

So Niall puts on his jeans without the hole in the knees and a nice shirt and combs his hair, not for any particular reason, mind, but Bobby did tell him to behave. Right. Niall’s just trying to make his family proud, and all.

Aisling is already sitting at their table when Niall shows up to the diner a solid five minutes early. She smiles and waves when she sees him, so Niall doesn’t feel particularly awkward about going over and pulling out a chair. Sometimes people don’t recognize him the first time they see him, and then second time, it’s all. It’s weird.

“Denise called me and told me you were coming,” Aisling says. She pushes a menu over to him. “Does your sister-in-law orchestrate most of your first dates, then?”

Niall just stares at her until Aisling laughs, and then he tries not to fidget while a blush crawls up his throat to his cheeks. “I’m sure she’d do more if she could. Sorry about that, I didn’t ask – not that I’m not, like, uh, not that I’m upset? Or, er…”

Aisling leans forward, her dark hair falling forward like curtains on either side of her face. “I’m not either,” she whispers, and her cheeks turn rosier.

Turns out she knows he’s a former pop star and thinks it’s well and good, but she prefers classic rock, so they spend the better part of their lunch talking about Thin Lizzy and Talking Heads and Radiohead.

“U2, eh,” she flaps her hand. “After that last album?”

Niall shakes his head. “You can’t judge a band by their worst album, though. Like, that’s not what they’re capable of. _Joshua Tree_ is, like, classic.”

“What’s your best album, then?” she asks. Aisling’s ordered pasta and she twirls her fork in the noodles like you’re meant to, but they keep sliding off the end. Niall wants to tell her to use a spoon at the bottom, like, the way Harry showed him, but it’s kind of nice watching her do her best to slurp up the pasta like she doesn’t particularly care to impress him. It’s not meant to be perfect.

Niall sits back in his seat. He’s got a soft spot for all their albums, honestly, but especially the later ones. The songs that were theirs, proper, and not just ones they’d sang on. He knows Harry’s is _Four_ , and Liam and Louis wrote so much on _Midnight Memories_ how could they not love it? Niall did his bit of writing, too, but it’s not like. Not like he himself had to write them to make them his; it was enough that some of those were about him, even the ones that Harry didn’t write.

“Can’t really say,” Niall decides. “I loved ‘Story of my Life,’ though.”

Aisling hums interestedly. “What is it about?”

“Eh,” Niall says. He can’t well say it’s about having someone to take care of, because he thinks maybe that might sound a bit pathetic, and also, he always had Harry to fret about. And himself. So it’s not, like. Anyway. “Women,” Niall finally answers. “Louis’s nan and Harry’s mum and Zayn’s – uh, Zayn’s sister.”

Aisling nods slowly. “I’ve seen pictures of him,” she says. “I think he’s handsome.”

Niall actually laughs out loud. “You and everybody else.” He heaves a breath. “So, what’s being a veterinarian like, then?”

Aisling wrinkles her nose. “Do you want to hear about having to induce vomiting on a dog that swallowed its owner’s thumb drive?”

“Actually,” says Niall, “sure.”

They amble out of the diner only after the waitress politely asks them to free up her booth, Niall actually streaming tears over the cat that literally ate the canary. Aisling’s coat whips against her knees in the gentle breeze, and her hair blows all around her face. It smells like tea and toast, like reading the newspaper at the kitchen table. Aisling calmly finger-combs her hair back.

For the first time in a long time, Niall doesn’t really have anything scheduled for the rest of the day, so he bites the inside of his cheek and asks, “Want to go for a walk, or something?”

“Or something,” Aisling shrugs, and threads her arm through Niall’s. She feels snug and solid against his side. Like most agricultural towns Niall’s been to halfway between “here” and “there,” the town itself is spread wide, like the scanty few pubs and the theatre and the grocer’s and all the rest of it have to take up as much space as a proper town. And Niall was taught that the English were the ones with the walls.

So it’s not so much by chance as it is there’s nowhere else to go that Niall and Aisling wind up stood outside The Stables. Niall drapes his arms over the top of the wrought iron fence outside and leans against it, almost like he’s a little kid again trying to get in. “Used to sneak in here,” he volunteers to Aisling. “When I was small.”

She angles herself to block the wind from hitting him, which is so – Niall doesn’t get that, people taking care of him that way, except Liam and Louis. It’s strange and unexpected and he touches the back of her hand before he can wonder whether he should. “What was it?” she asks.

“A club,” Niall answers. “Really it’s a pub with a stage, but they had some amazing musicians play here back in the day. Paddy Casey and Damien Dempsey and The Frames, even – a few of them.” Niall shakes his head. “Legends.”

“You thought, someday, you’d play here?” she asks. She doesn’t sound disbelieving. Her Irish accent sounds as frank as Bobby’s does, or Niall’s own. It is what it is, a voice like that says. Niall leans into it.

Niall takes a chance and wraps his arm around her shoulders, so that at least they’re huddled against the breeze together. She’s at the exact right height for that, fits under his arm easily. Niall’s not been used to being so much bigger than the person he’s with, really. It’s not bad. Just different. “Want to get a hot chocolate?” Niall asks.

“Sure,” says Aisling. She loops her arm round his waist and holds him to her side, and then she segues gracefully into another story about a pet turtle that someone brought in to her office.

“You’re home late,” Bobby observes, when Niall finally gets home from his lunch well into the evening. “Everything alright?”

“Denise set me up on a date,” Niall sighs. He stands just inside the door and fidgets with his scarf. “I think. It seemed to go okay, I think.”

By “okay” he means Aisling stretched up on her tiptoes to give him a gentle kiss goodnight, her fingers trailing through the back of his hair, and Niall sort of felt like someone had punched him in the gut. In a good way. He thinks.

“That’s good,” Bobby says.

Niall clears his throat. “I need to see Louis and Liam. I think I’m – yeah. I think I’m going to go to London at the end of the week.”

Bobby just shrugs. “Alright, son. Be good.”

So Niall thinks about booking himself a ticket on a commercial flight, but the seats are so small, and he can’t just roll the window up or leave if someone starts taking his picture. He could rent a private flight, but that seems so wasteful and like such a – well, such a popstar thing to do. In the end, Niall books himself a place on the ferry. He takes his dad’s old truck instead of his own well expensive car because he’d quite like to get in and out of the city without being noticed, but if he has to be, well. It just seems right that it happens with his father’s truck, is all. Something about that. Niall doesn’t really know.

Mostly Niall’s so nervous that he thinks he might chew himself to bits. The insides of his cheeks are sore and bleeding by the time he pulls up outside of Louis’s house. He keys in Louis’s gate code – Freddie’s birthday – and hurries up the walk.

Liam opens the door. His familiar face creases up in a wide smile and he scoops Niall up into a hug before Niall can even get a good look at him. He lifts Niall off his feet, he holds him so tight. Niall pats his back weakly until Liam takes the hint and lets him go. “You look fantastic, Nialler,” says Liam. “Really.”

“You look good, too,” says Niall. He looks too thin, Niall thinks, but Liam always does hit the fitness button after a break-up. Anyway, he’s with Louis, so he’ll be fine. Those two are always fine together.

Liam steps back to let Niall into the house, and Louis appears at his shoulder as if summoned by magic. “Niall Horan,” Louis says solemnly, and then he pulls Niall into a hug. “Come,” he says, “Come see my babies, come see.” Liam shoots an odd look at the back of Louis’s head but they follow him obediently down the hall, where Fred and Belle are sat up in the middle of a cage in the living room.

“Aw,” says Niall. “They look like little puppies.”

Louis scowls and whacks Niall in the gut with the back of his hand. “Shut the fuck up, those are my children.”

“Don’t curse around the children,” Liam says. He bends down and scoops up Belle, who’s wearing the tiniest velvet dress Niall has ever seen. “Here,” Liam says, and hands her to Niall.

“Oh,” Niall starts uncertainly. “Um, hi, Belle. I’m your dad’s friend.” She makes a quiet sound and fists her hand in his shirt, so Niall holds her closer to his chest. She pops a couple of fingers into her mouth and settles in right against his chest, and Niall looks round to Louis, who looks undeniably satisfied.

“She’s perfect, isn’t she?” he asks. It doesn’t really sound like a question.

Niall sits down with the baby on his lap while Louis helps his son toddle around the room and stop him from eating dirt from the potted ficus near the door. “So,” Niall starts, looking at Liam. “Things with Cheryl are over?”

“What?” Liam asks, his laugh sounding just this side of hysterical. “No. We’re fine, everything’s fine. I, er,” he stops again.

The door bell goes and both Liam’s and Louis’s faces drop at the same time.

Niall doesn’t even have time to ask what’s on before they’re stuffing baby things into nappy bags and bundling the babes up into the most ridiculous puffy jackets Niall’s ever seen on human beings the size of large cats.

Briana’s stood at the door. “Hey, guys,” she says.

And, oh. Niall gets it.

“How are they doing today?” Briana asks, while Liam and Louis strap the babies into baby carriers.

“Good, good,” Louis answers. “They both finished a bottle of milk about half an hour ago, Freddie’s got a bit of the runs so we were going to keep an eye on that.”

“Great, sounds great,” Briana says. She swings her hair back and loops the baby bag over her shoulder.

Liam tries to help her with the baby carriers and Lou cuts through, soft, “Bri.”

She turns as if unwilling back to Louis. “They could stay,” he says weakly. “You all could, you and your whole family, if you wanted. We could see them all the time.”

“My home is LA,” Briana says. “America. And yours is here, I know. This is just the best we can do for now, yeah?”

Niall starts worrying over the inside of his cheek.

“Until one of us is willing to make a sacrifice?” Louis demands. “C’mon, that’s shit and you know it is. We can do better than that.”

“I’m sorry, Lou,” Briana just says. Louis’s shoulders drop like he’s a popped balloon. “I’ll see you on the third when you pick them up, right?”

“Yeah,” Louis agrees solemnly. He stands still while Briana finishes collecting their things and then Liam gently closes the door behind her. “Let’s get wasted,” says Louis, who marches back toward the living room like a man on a mission.

Niall catches Liam’s eye. Liam shrugs and nods, which says a lot, so Niall follows them in. Louis takes little sips of bourbon while he paces round the kitchen, mumbling under his breath all the while. Niall picks at the label on his beer bottle. “Maybe we should go out, yeah?” Niall asks. He shrugs helplessly. “For something to do.”

Liam looks at Louis as subtly as he can. “Tomorrow’s my birthday,” Louis says, like they all don’t know. “And my kids are going to be on the other side of the planet. I don’t want to drink, I want to be in LA.”

“So go, right?” Niall asks.

Louis shakes his head. “I’ve got work to do on the label, Payno knows.”

Liam runs a hand over his buzzed head, over and over again, like he likes the way it feels. Maybe it’s a new nervous habit. “Want to get takeout and watch the Batman movies?” he asks.

So they do. Liam conks out just halfway through Batman Begins and Louis stops Niall from waking him. “He’s had his hands full taking care of me,” Louis sighs. “Idiot.” Louis lifts his eyes, which have never looked so deep or dark or blue before, to level a look at Niall. “What are you really here for, Mr. Moonlights?”

Niall fiddles with the bit of hair by his ear. “What, I can’t want to catch up?”

“You’ve been avoiding us,” Louis shrugs. He leans back into the couch and urges Liam’s head into his lap. Liam rolls without a moment of hesitation, snoring fit to wake the dead. Louis sighs and reaches for the bottle of bourbon. “Not that I blame you.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Niall says. “I thought, if something happened, someone would’ve –”

“What, called?” Louis snorts. “Harold was your survival buddy and look at him. Neither of us have heard from him in,” Louis sighs. “And you haven’t, either.”

“I’ve seen the pap pics,” Niall starts, stops. “He looks…”

“You should talk to Gemma,” Louis says. “If you want to know how he is, or still care, or whatever.”

Niall scowls. “And you should get off your couch and move to LA, if that’s what you want to do, you arsehole.”

Louis looks up at Niall with wide eyes. He doesn’t look hurt, exactly. Just surprised, and like he knows Niall’s right.

All the anger goes out of Niall at once. “Christ, sorry, I don’t know where that came from. Sorry, I – sorry.”

Louis shakes his head slowly. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

“Liam might come with you,” Niall says slowly, lightly. “And if not, he’s got Cheryl, or Sophia.” Personally, Niall doesn’t think Liam and Sophia will ever really be over each other. Like Louis and Eleanor, they spent too many intense years together not to have left an indelible impression on each other.

Shaking his head slowly, Louis says, “Do you ever think we made a mistake splitting up?”

Niall tenses. “You mean the vote. To come back.”

“Not that I’m blaming you,” Louis says, “but is any one of us doing better now than we would be if we were together?”

Niall tangles his fingers together so hard they hurt. “You are blaming me,” he says, quiet.

“Not like that,” Louis says, so quiet it hurts. “Just, you’re doing fine, aren’t you?”

Niall’s head snaps up. “If you think I did that for me, if you think I didn’t want us to stay together forever –”

Louis looks at him so soft Niall’s afraid of breaking. “We couldn’t have done,” Louis says, his voice still so soft. “I have the kids and the label and you had the Moonlights and Harry had you. I’m just jealous, I suppose.” Louis laughs bitterly.  

“I was so afraid he’d break my heart,” Niall says, quiet.

Louis shakes his head. “You think you know how hard he loves you, you think he’ll be alright if you walk away. Trust me, I know.”

Niall watches Liam snore on Louis’s lap, Louis’s absent-minded hands petting Liam’s head. “Met someone,” Niall says. “Maybe.” They’ve been texting all week; Aisling keeps him updated on her patient roster of a puppy with a thorn in its foot and a cat with a snakebite, and Niall’s slowly been filling her in on band stuff. _Visiting Louis and Liam today_ , he’d sent. _They’re like my brothers. I mean, my other brothers._

Sick to his stomach, Niall’s already started twisting his fingers together in his lap until they feel like they might crumble apart. “Harry said – he doesn’t want to love me anymore.” It’s not good for him, is the thing. Niall remembers what he said just fine; he didn’t quite mean them, though, not in the sense that. Not in the sense that he wouldn’t suffer it if he could. He’s done hurting Harry, is all.

Louis lifts his head. “Yeah?” he asks. “What’re they like?”

Niall heaves a sigh. “She’s so smart,” he says. “Like, so much smarter than me. She’s from County Westmeath, too, and she knows just about everybody in town and no one has a mean thing to say about her. She does this thing, with her hair,” Niall tries to demonstrate, “when she’s thinking, and she covers her mouth when she laughs.”

“Yeah?” Louis smiles.

Niall clears his throat. “Yeah, man. She, like. I don’t know.” He hardly knows her, Niall thinks, even though they’ve stayed up half the night most of the week on the phone talking about their favorite flavors of Starburst and how they dealt with not having mums to take care of them all the time from a young age. Stuff like that. “Makes me feel normal, I guess.”

Louis nods once. “Good. That’s good for you.”

“And the band, my band, I mean, the Moonlights – we think we can probably do an album. Mostly live stuff and covers, you know.” He bites his lip. “Some original stuff. I didn’t want to, like, start recording unless you knew, like. Unless you knew I was still yours first.”

Louis smiles, but his eyes are so sad. “We know, Nialler lad. You do it, yeah?”

Niall shakes his head. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You’re living the dream,” Louis says. He knocks back another gulp of bourbon and then he sets the empty bottle on the coffee table. “The rest of us burned out, but you. You’re living it.”

“Harry – Harry was born for it.”

“Yeah, but you were _made,_ ” Louis says. He nudges Niall’s chin. “Hey, yeah, you should go home. Go back to your dad and your nephew and your girl. We’ll see you soon enough.”

Niall bites his bottom lip hard. “Okay. See you around, Louis.”

Louis pats him on the cheek, and then he goes back to studying the TV with Liam’s head on his lap. The sun is just sinking under the horizon when Niall steps out onto the street. He calls Aisling.

“On your way home?” she asks. He can hear a pen click and hum as it skates over a clipboard.

“Yeah,” Niall says. “A couple of hours.”

The pen clicks again and there’s the soft sound of Aisling setting the clipboard down. “We can grab a drink when you get back,” she says. Her voice grows soft. “Are you alright, Niall?”

Niall starts the car and rests behind the wheel a moment. He’s lucky he didn’t get a parking ticket; he hadn’t realized he was parked in the fire lane. The Lumineers new album plays over the radio, soft and quiet and a little blue, and Niall changes the station. U2’s singing about running to stand still on the next station, so Niall lets it play. “Do you think we can stay friends?” Niall asks. “While I’m gone, I mean. Just, if you want to talk sometimes.” He ducks his head. “You don’t have to.”

“I don’t want to be just friends,” Aisling says, in her soft, clear voice. “But yes, we can keep talking. How were the boys?” Relief reinflates Niall’s chest like a balloon. He starts describing them to her in as much detail as he can remember, just so that she’ll know all the things he can’t quite say yet, because she’s smart that way. He takes the truck back to the ferry to go back to Ireland, and she stays on the line with him while she closes down the vet’s office and walks home to her little house.

Niall pulls the truck up outside Aisling’s house. His ear is so hot from holding his phone against it for hours, and his bad knee aches from the humidity. He clears his throat.

“Come in, you idiot,” Aisling says, twitching the curtains aside so she can peek out the window, so Niall kills the engine and goes inside.

Aisling drags her fingers through the patch of hair on Niall’s chest, and he pulls her closer to her side. Her bedroom is cool and dark and if Niall closes his eyes, it’s like he’s not anywhere at all. Like they’re in a moment set apart. “We should go to sleep,” Aisling whispers. “I have work tomorrow.”

“A few more minutes,” Niall says.

Aisling doesn’t ask why; Niall would like to think she already knows he can’t sleep but for dreaming about Harry, and he doesn’t want that tonight. He’s so afraid the dreams will have stopped, though. Sometimes they’re the only way Niall knows it was real. He clears his throat and Aisling shifts closer to him, the apple of her cheek soft against his shoulder. “Ask me what I dream about.”

“What do you dream about?” Niall echoes obediently.

“A farm,” she answers. “I’ve wanted to live on a farm since I was a little kid. You know? With a couple of horses and some sheep and maybe even a goat, although I’ve known some goats to have been right pests.”

Niall laughs, quiet, like there’s someone in the house not to wake up. “Any more?”

“Mm,” Aisling goes on, her cold nose tucked between the inside of Niall’s arm and his ribs, “some chickens and ducks, I should think. Oh, and an old barn cat. And a dog to grow old with.”

“Sounds lovely,” Niall says.

“You can come, too,” Aisling says. Her palm fits neatly over his hipbone; it tickles when she drags her hand back up to his chest. “As long as you promise to wipe your shoes on the mat before you come in.”

“Sounds fair enough,” Niall whispers, and kisses the nearest bit of her within reach. She shuffles around under her mouth lands soft over his, and Niall kisses back till he can’t keep his eyes open. When he sleeps, he only dreams of Harry for a moment, and then the moment passes, and he’s gone.

***

Tour resumes in Paris and continues to Brussels, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Prague. As much as Niall begged for an East Asian leg of tour, Ed’s label couldn’t spring for the extra booking fees, so the Moonlights’ last Eastern European gig on the European leg of the tour is played in Budapest, to an audience that sings along with every song on their setlist. It’s always a changing thing, the Moonlights’ setlist, because Armand plays jazz and they’ve always got some visiting musician playing with them, but still the audience is listening. And paying attention, and enjoying, and singing along so loud than Niall can hear them even through his in-ears. He leaves the stage absolutely sopping in sweat. Backstage, Cian leaps onto his back and wraps his legs around Niall’s waist.

“We did it!” Cian screams. He nuzzles Niall’s sweaty hair. “You beautiful Irish son of a bitch, we did it!”

“We push!” Niall says, and then he puts a hand over his chest, swallows hard. “Get off me back, Cian, the bus has been killing me.”

Cian obediently clambers off of Niall’s back, but he just circles back around to get into Niall’s face. At least he presses a bottle of water into his hand. “We’ve just got the UK and Ireland gigs left, and we already know that everybody there loves you.

“Okay, okay,” Niall mumbles. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

"No, he’s right,” Emma says. She slips her hand into Niall’s; the tips of her fingers feel like bone, they’re so calloused. She looks him right in the eye and smiles, and Niall wonders where the shy girl who wouldn’t even say his name went. “We smashed it.” Cian glibly takes her other hand and Emma puts a hand over her face to hide it.

“I’ll miss you guys,” Cian says, looking right at her. “Till the next tour, I guess, I mean. I don’t know.”

“Actually,” Niall clears his throat. “Armand?” he asks. The rest of the band form a loose circle in a corner backstage, where the floors are cheap, chipped linoleum and the walls are water-stained. For someone with such a god-awful amount of money, Niall’s spent a huge amount of his life in deteriorating concert venues. He feels more comfortable in places like these, though, anyway.

Armand smiles. Sam hefts his daughter, Simon, onto his shoulders. “We’ve got ourselves a recording deal, Moonlights,” and even Niall smiles. They pull together in a tight group hug, Emma’s hand fisted in the back of Niall’s shirt and Armand’s solid, comforting arm across Niall’s back, and Niall believes in it. In music, or the dream, or whatever it is that makes moments like these possible. He closes his eyes and breathes it in.

He calls Gemma that night on the bus. “Little brother,” she answers, her voice warm. Niall stops pacing up and down the tiny living room and the even tinier kitchen while Cian snores in his bunk with Emma tucked up against the wall next to him. He’d come onboard after the concert afterparty to find them cuddled up together, and as long as they don’t try to get freaky two feet above his head, he’s happy for them.

“It’s,” Niall starts. “It’s not Harry, Gem, it’s me.”

“I know,” Gemma sighs. “You know I’ve adopted the lot of you. I would’ve married you, too, if you hadn’t been in love with my brother.”

Niall sits down slowly in the middle of the living room. He gradually lies down on the questionable brown carpet. “I would’ve said yes,” he says. “Would we have been happy together, I wonder?”

“No, you’d still have been in love with my baby brother,” Gemma says amicably, so Niall laughs. “He’s alright, by the way. If that’s why you’re calling.”

Niall clears his throat and struggles back up to sit. He starts chewing on the side of his fingers. His fingernails are such a wreck that he can’t even gnaw on them anymore, partly from learning new ways to play the guitar, partly because he’s been chewing them too much. “It is,” he says. “So you can be honest with me, yeah?”

Gemma sighs. “He’s not happy,” she says, dropping her voice to a whisper. “And he’s a little lost. I don’t know.”

“What’s he said?” Niall asks, because apparently he’s a masochist now. “Has he talked about me?”

“He misses you,” Gemma answers. She’s quiet for a moment and Niall watches that damn loose light fixture swing above the dining table in the tiny tour bus kitchen. “He’s been writing a lot, and, uh. He moved out of his house in LA. He’s staying in a flat in New York now.”

Niall closes his eyes. “I know the place,” he whispers.

Gemma clucks and says, “It wasn’t your fault, you know. Any more than it was his, or less.”

Niall swallows dry, then he tries to swallow again. “I’m,” he starts, stops. “I’m trying to let him go. I think – I think it’s probably best for both of us.” He knots his fingers in his hair and pulls just for the way it stings. “If he asks, could you tell him – I don’t know.” He wanted them to work so bad, and he’d tried so hard. Some days Niall still wakes up in the middle of the night thinking he’s in a hotel room with One Direction on tour, and Harry’s in the next room over with the adjoining door open between them.

He’d shuffle into Niall’s room five minutes before bus call to wake Niall up himself, usually by lying down next to him. He’d stroke Niall’s cheek or his forehead with the tip of his finger and then he’d jam his hand up Niall’s armpit to tickle him awake, and as long as Niall pretended he was still asleep, Harry would keep doing it. Sometimes Niall still glances over his shoulder to look for Harry’s reaction to something, a smile or a laugh or that ridiculous frown, and he won’t be there.

It’s just. Niall was supposed to keep the band together, because he wasn’t the strongest singer and he wasn’t the leader and he wasn’t the one all the fans loved. He was the one the boys loved. And if he can’t do that – if he can’t stay tethered to Harry somehow, then he’ll have. He’ll have failed, and he’ll have said no to bringing them back together, and he may never have that again. One Direction, the strange and magnificent, forever bound to be something bigger than themselves. Just four blokes. He was looking forward to growing old with them, is all.

“I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t love him,” Niall finally says. He props his elbows up on his knees and drops his head. “God.”

“Niall,” Gemma says gently. “I know.”

Niall wipes at his face. “Okay. I love you, Gem, you know. Always will.”

“Love you too,” she says easily. “My other little brother.” She rings off.

 _Coming home soon_ , Niall texts Aisling.

She doesn’t text back till morning, when she wakes up to go to work. _Great, you can meet my parents_ , she’s sent. Niall snorts a laugh. _They’ll probably hate you._

 _Families love me,_ Niall sends, and then he crawls into his bunk and tries to go to sleep.

***

The last four tour dates are at the Hammersmith Odeon and Dublin’s own Whelan’s. The LIC turns out for his gigs in London, and Niall even convinces Aisling to take a Friday afternoon off work to come see him.

"I just want you to know,” she tells him loudly, climbing out of the front seat of the Beamer, “that I am a fully self-sufficient woman on my own. Your money is as fairy gold to me, you realize.”

“Right,” Niall says, because he hasn’t a clue what she’s on about. They’ve a few hours left before the other performers turn out for the gig, so Niall’s Aisling up the road from the Odeon to Liberty in London.

Aisling turns on her heel in the middle of the fanciest department store Niall himself has ever seen. “It’s not even my birthday,” she says faintly. “Niall.”

“You must have a birthday eventually,” Niall shrugs, taking her hand. She leans heavily into his side. “If it’s too much we can always go back to the park and feed the ducks. I know how much you like feeding the ducks.”

Someone taps him on the shoulder so Niall turns to find a girl, maybe in her teens, stood behind him. “Hi, sorry,” she starts with a smile, so Niall knows what’s coming next. “Could I, um. Could I have a picture?”

Aisling immediately starts to move away, but Niall puts a hand on her arm. “We can,” he starts, because he remembers how much some of the other members of the team hated having their photo done.

“No, uh, please?” the girl asks. She smiles again, nervously, and Niall clocks the way her hands are trembling around her phone. “You, um.”

So Niall gently pulls Aisling back to his side and sorts out of the shot for the fan quick as can be. He’s a little surprised he remembers how to do that so well, all things told. Although it’s not been that long. It just feels it.

Aisling’s flexing her hands around the strap of her purse when Niall turns back. “That happens a lot, doesn’t it?” she asks.

“Sometimes,” Niall says. “Not as much as it used to.”

Aisling nods and looks around at the store one more time. “I think I’d like to feed the ducks, actually,” so they leave. Niall’s a little happy to get out of there, too, to be honest. Aisling crouches beside the lake in Hyde Park while the ducks feed on the bits of bird food she threw out, so Niall drops down beside her.

“We haven’t really talked about,” she starts, stops. “About the one you dated, about Harry. It was in all the papers.”

Niall reels back in surprise. “Why are you asking about Harry?”

“Because you loved him,” Aisling answers honestly. “You never talk about the things that bother you, or the people you love, unless someone asks. It’s too personal. I know.”

Niall anxious rubs his palms over and over the thighs of his jeans. “I like it,” he says. “That you ask, I mean.”

“But you don’t want to answer?”

“No, I,” but Niall doesn’t really know what. It’s like he’s on this side of the lake, and he wants to be on the other side, but he doesn’t know how to swim. Funny how so much of his life has started to feel that way. All that naff about making your dreams come true only makes sense while you’re still trying to make them happen, but no one ever said that when it’s over it doesn’t feel real. It feels like a dream. He can’t just start back over on the other side of the lake, back to where they still had all of it in front of them. He wants to go forward. “It wasn’t real,” Niall finally says. “It didn’t happen, me and Harry. We got papped snogging as a joke and it snowballed from there.”

Aisling turns to look at Niall, who makes his face as open as he can manage. He’s not lying, is the thing. He told Harry, “You’re never going to be ready, are you? Not for real, not if it’s not pretend and we’re guaranteed to break up in a few months.” It shouldn’t feel like such a betrayal now to stop hoping. To let him go. Waiting to get the timing right would’ve killed both of them. This is softer. Kinder. Better. This is real life.

“You could be my best friend,” Aisling says. “Just, don’t be like Molly, alright? She was my dog and my best friend when I was a little girl and she ran away, and.” Aisling stops, smooths her hands down her skirt till it lies flat. “So don’t just run away and leave me behind, okay? Take me with you.”

Niall swallows, nods. “I promise.”

***

The LIC show up to support Niall and the Moonlights at the last gig of tour. Whelan’s is a classically Irish venue, which basically means that the wooden stage is chipped from musicians smashing their guitars back when that was the thing to do, and all the toilet stalls have writings on them like JP+HC 11/22/1985. Niall always wonders about inscriptions like that. Did the couple really make it, are they together still? He wonders if they even remember the scribble one of them must’ve done in Sharpie one night so many years ago. Probably not. In his experience, people don’t often remember the promises they made when no one was watching.

Aisling goes out with Niall and Eoghan and Laura and Bressie for a round of drinks after the show is over. Niall’s buzzing under the collar from the show, from hos perfect it was, from how transcendently proud he is of the band that’s finally grown together.

Today he walked in on Armand doing push-ups with Cian on his back while Sam and Emma calmly stood by and did a tally, and it wasn’t even slightly weird. He misses them distantly even though they’ll be rounded up together in the recording studio in just a few weeks. Ed got them studio time at Abbey Road Studios in Studio Two, and Niall’s palms only break out in a nervous sweat every time he thinks about it, but it’ll be fantastic. It’ll be amazing.       

“I have to say, you’re adapting better than I thought you would,” says Bressie. He fusses at the paper label on his beer bottle. “I’d have thought you’d have struggled more.”

Niall shrugs and leaves his shoulders up by his ears, like he’s got to defend himself. He’s been wondering the same thing, honestly, between waking up in a sweat on the tour bus in the middle of the night because he dreamt Harry was trying to get Niall to give him a lap dance again.

Niall’s never quite free of Harry, especially because Harry’s sat in the audience of every show with his hair pulled back and Rumour at his feet, his notebook open across his knees. Some nights the worst part about waking up from dreams about him is that Niall ever had those things at all. 

Aisling puts her small, warm hand on Niall’s back. “He’s done a shit job adjusting,” she opines. “He always opens the tea bag and leaves the paper wrapper on the counter like I’m the maid at a hotel come to clean up after him.” Aisling taps him lightly on the chin, her eyes all soft and warm. “And then he’s always underfoot making dinner and trying to help with laundry.” Aisling props her chin up in her hand, a blush coloring her cheeks. “Terrible, this one.”

“We’re glad he’s yours to deal with, then,” says Eoghan smoothly. He winks at Niall across the table and Niall ducks his head and laughs.

Laura joins Niall at the bar while he’s waiting for the bartender to get them another round of pints. “She’s too good for you,” Laura says plainly. She leans her hip against the counter and folds her arms over her chest. “You’re all wonky and backwards and folded up inside.”

Niall wants to put a hand over his chest or clutch either shoulder like he’s going down a waterslide, he feels so transparent. “Um,” says Niall brilliantly.

“Which is not to say I don’t love you, or that you aren’t absolutely lovely,” says Laura. “But it does mean you’re very hard to know, sometimes. You know that, right?”

“I do,” Niall mumbles. He clears his throat. “Yeah, I know.” He got so good at deflecting fans’ attention and making them think they knew him in and out when really they knew nothing, he’s always wondered if he does it to people he really knows, too. Actually, that’s a lie. He’s known he’s doing and it and done it anyway because it’s easier. Not everyone needs to know about all the gammy things that make your stomach feel like it’s turning to water.

Laura nods. “Because I know some of those things,” Laura says, soft, just for Niall to hear. He thinks he might hear the words even if he couldn’t actually hear them, like the way she’s looking at him is enough. “If you want to love someone, sometimes you have to be vulnerable with them. It’s not enough to only love one way, and not let them love you too, okay?”

Niall nods. “Okay. Yes.”

“Good,” says Laura. “Now that’s done, let’s have those drinks, eh?” She manages to scoop up three drinks from the bar – Niall hadn’t even noticed them there – and Niall grabs the last two. He slides back into the bar next to Aisling, who wraps her hand around his forearm and gives him a soft look. Niall doesn’t know what his face is doing, so he just nods.

He lies awake for a long time after she’s fallen asleep beside him, thinking about what Laura’s said. He knows she’s not wrong. Just, it’s been so easy to only let Aisling see the good parts of him, the best parts, and not all the wonky backwards stuff.

The stuff that Harry knew about and worked his way through like some kind of Indiana Jones through the Temple of Doom, stealing away with something more precious than Niall’s heart. He’s not sure if he’s gotten it back or if he’s just found something else, and he wonders about that. The stuff you only ever have the strength to let one person see.

He thought Harry had seen everything and maybe that’s true, maybe that’s why Harry found him wanting, same as Niall found Harry. They just weren’t ready for each other yet, somehow. Niall wants to be ready for this, for the next thing, recording and touring and maybe someday having a couple of little girls of his own like Sam’s got.

So maybe he doesn’t need all of the backwards and inside-out folded up stuff he built up to keep the fans and Harry from pulling him apart at the seams. Maybe he can be, like. Simple. Straightforward. A man like Bobby, or Armand, men who are precisely what they say they are, and usually more, but never less.

Niall clears his throat and touches Aisling’s shoulder. She’s curled onto her side, her dark hair fanned out over the pillow. Her pale skin looks perfect under the moonlight filtering in past the pale curtains over her window. “What’s wrong?” she mumbles, hardly blinking awake.

Niall licks his lips. “I love you,” he says. As usual, when he says the words out loud and wants most to mean them – for them to fill the room or at least the space between their bodies, for the moment to be transcendent and placed somehow outside the bounds of time – it doesn’t happen. Niall told someone he loved them, for real, and the world doesn’t end.

Aisling peeks her eyes open. The corners of her mouth curl up in a smile. “Love you too,” she says.

Niall knows he’s absolutely cheesing, but he can’t make himself stop. Doesn’t much want to. “Oh, yeah?” he asks. “Want to prove it to me?”

“Well,” she sighs, but she’s already sliding across the bed into his lap. It feels simple, Niall thinks. Easy. Good. Somehow he’d forgotten that not every love had to be tortuous and hard-wrung. Maybe, he thinks, closing his eyes, it can just be good.

***

Niall likes Aisling’s little house in Mullingar more than his own house in London, so he puts off moving back to Britain for the studio sessions till the last minute. He loved decorating his last house in a neighborhood north of London but so much of what he put up in there is too steeped in memories now to bring out of storage. He has One Direction photographs and awards and jerseys and those are all things that he loves and that he’s proud of, but they aren’t where he’s at in his life right now. Those days are behind him, and with him. But he’s not living in the middle of them, like he used to be. They’re living inside of him.

Aisling’s kitchen cabinets are peeling white paint and gauzy pink curtains are hung up in both the kitchen and her bedroom, and the couch is this caved-in pleather number she got on sale at the local furniture store. A table by the door holds a stack of veterinary journals and the dish for her keys and bookshelves reaching up to the ceiling are filled the brim with thick tomes by Charles Dickens and Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf.

She’s a little like Niall, he’s found. They do just fine on their own, and sometimes their lives show it.

He’s outside in the back garden picking weeds from her herb garden when his phone rings. Niall takes his heavy canvas and leather gloves off and slips the phone out of his pocket, expecting it to be Cian calling to talk about instrument rentals and whether or not Hozier will have the time to drop by for a recording while they’re at Abbey Road Studios.

Instead, it’s Gemma. Niall accepts the call without another thought and grindingly climbs to his feet. His bad knee is just getting worse with age. “Hey,” he says.

“Hi,” Gemma answers. “I can’t talk long today, me and Brian are going wedding cake-tasting in a bit.”

“If you get cream cheese frosting, I’ll pay for it,” Niall says without thinking. He’d buy all the cake in the world if it all came with cream cheese frosting.

Gemma falls silent, and Niall realizes his mistake. “I mean, not that – I probably can’t come, because of tour and everything, so. Preemptively thank you and I’m sorry for the invitation.” He laughs awkwardly. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Gemma soothes him. Niall kicks off his dirty trainers and pads to the kitchen to grab a bottle of water out of the refrigerator. A gasp of condensation puffs out of the freezer when Niall opens the fridge door, and he wipes at the sweat dripping down his brow. “It’s kind of hard to be friends with your little brother’s ex. Preemptively I’m sorry you can’t make it, Niall. I know you’d be there if you could.”

“Thanks for inviting me,” Niall answers. He hobbles back out to the plastic green lawn chair in Aisling’s back garden. “How is he?” Niall asks.

Gemma hums just like Harry does before he answers a question. “It’s Harry. You know. He’s – a little fragile, sometimes.” She sighs. “Kendall dumped him. Oh, and he’s having a surgery on his vocal chords.”

Niall sits bolt upright in his seat. “What?”

“Yeah, because of – er, from when he was in the band. It’s not a major thing, I don’t think he’s all that concerned about it. He’s been talking about doing a photography book –”

“Gemma,” Niall says.

She sounds significantly more worried when she asks, “What is it, Niall?”

“He wouldn’t be talking about a photography book if he wasn’t worried he wouldn’t be able to sing again.” Niall looks down at his lap, swallows. “When’s the surgery? Where’s it at?”

“The Blackrock Clinic,” Gemma answers. “Jesus. Niall, you don’t have to come. I’ll talk to him, and his doctors, I’m sure –”

Niall’s already trying to toe his trainers back on. “I know,” he says. “I’ll be there, though. You know. Just in case.”

“They’re probably taking him back now, Niall, I’m sat in the waiting room. There’s nothing to do now but wait for him to wake up, you don’t –”

“Yes,” Niall says curtly, “I do.”

Niall changes out of his cargo shorts and into a pair of jeans and puts a flannel on top of his t-shirt. Then he calls Aisling. “I need to go to London today,” Niall says. “I’m really sorry.”

“Oh, I was planning on making dinner,” she says. “Is it a work thing?”

Niall chews over his bottom lip. Simple, he thinks. Straightforward. Easy. “No,” he says. “It’s for Harry. My old band mate?”

“Was he in an accident? Is he alright?” she asks, sounding worried. “Do you want me to come with you?”

“No,” Niall answers, too fast. “No, no, it’s alright. I’ll just be gone for the night, I think. I don’t know, I’ll call you, I promise. I’ll have dinner delivered, I’m so sorry.”

Aisling’s voice sounds like someone who’s used to crisis situations. “Don’t worry about it,” she says firmly. “Do what you have to do.”

So Niall goes. He boards a panic-inducingly small commercial plane jam-packed with passengers. He wraps his fingers around the armrests and tilts his head back against the seat and concentrates on breathing in through his nose, out through his mouth, for the entire forty-five minute flight. If people got pictures of him staving off a panic attack, good for them. Niall’s too busy to give a shit.

He takes a cab to the Blackrock Clinic because he doesn’t want to have to worry about hospital parking. The sliding double doors whoosh open and assault him with stale, sterilized hospital air, and Niall rocks on his heels before he summons the nerve to march in. He spent too much time in hospitals as it is. He didn’t want to ever think about coming back to another one, certainly not with his knee twinging with every stop. Certainly not with Harry flat on a surgeon’s slab somewhere in here.

Niall finds Gemma and Brian in the waiting room outside of the general medicine ward. Gemma introduces Niall and Brian, and Niall smiles and shakes his hand. He seems like a nice guy, Brian, as much as Niall knew Harry was trying to hate him.

Two hours trickle by. Niall drinks four cups of hospital coffee and only stops gulping it down when his leg won’t stop twitching. Gemma takes Brian’s head into her lap and finger combs his hair till the poor professor starts snoring.

“So,” Gemma asks. “What’s new with you? You haven’t said much, and we didn’t really get a chance to chat after the Odeon show.”

Niall stops picking at the dry skin on the back of his hand. “Good,” Niall says. It’s true, he tells himself. Tell her it’s true. “I met someone,” he admits in a rush. “I don’t – I haven’t told Harry, I wouldn’t even know how to tell him.” Niall bites his lip. He’s not sorry, so he doesn’t apologize. He wishes he could be, though. It’d be so much easier if he was just the bad guy and he could go on hating himself for letting Harry go in peace. He’s not, though. He doesn’t think he is. Pretty sure.

Gemma’s face looks pinched for a moment, and then she nods. “Go on, then,” she says, her voice quiet and soft as a whisper. “Tell me about him. Her?”

So Niall does. Aisling has an older brother that Niall wishes he got on with as well as he gets on with Gemma. ‘Course, Niall’s known Gem for six, almost seven years now. That’s a long time. And Aisling firmly believes that Greg is a good person at heart, no matter how gently Niall’s tried to warn her that the best thing Greg has ever done is have a son absolutely nothing like him. Maybe the worst part is, she’ll find out in time. Christ. Niall wouldn’t wish that on anyone, not even his brother.

“She likes your family then?” Gemma asks. Niall nods. He likes hers, too, her parents. They’re Irish Unionists and Niall hails from a proud Republican family, and Niall can’t shake the sense that they wish he was a little more…legitimate, maybe, is the word. Being a pop star is fun and all, but why doesn’t he have a real job, like being a lawyer or something in politics?

Aisling says not to let it bother him, because she doesn’t let it bother her. It does, a little, though. Niall quit school before he ever took his GCSEs and sometimes he wonders, is all. He hopes she doesn’t think he’s not smart, or something.

Gemma nods along while Niall pours his heart out to her and then Niall stops, suddenly hyperaware that this is Harry’s big sister, and that. That he’s already put too much on her, maybe. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “I should’ve told someone else, I haven’t seen Sam or Emma or Cian in a couple of weeks, it drives me mad – I’m so sorry.” 

“Niall,” Gemma says, quietly. She puts her hand on his jaw like Niall’s mother used to when she wanted him to pay attention. “I’m happy you’re happy.”

Someone clears their throat, and Gemma takes her hand away so Niall can look up at a nurse in a pair of light purple scrubs. “The surgery went well, we don’t think there will be any major vocal damage. You’re welcome to come up and wait in the patient’s room as long as you can be quiet.”

Niall nods and scrambles out of his seat, Gemma shaking Brian awake behind. They take the lift up to Harry’s room and gather round his bedside. He looks so pale and fragile, and so unlike himself. Even at his most robotic, Niall could always see the fragile moving parts behind Harry’s eyes. The soft parts, the parts he protected so hard he lost track of which were himself and which were constructed. And for all that, he looks great. His skin has cleared up as he’s grown and his hair is shorter, curling in tight ringlets. Jesus. Niall’s not sure what he’s going to do when Harry wakes up.

He’s saved figuring it out when he comes back from yet another vending machine snack run to hear his voice in the hall. Niall’s knees buckle, he’s missed Harry’s voice so much, and he sinks into the chair in the hall. He doesn’t mean to eavesdrop; it just happens.

“Okay,” Harry says. He clears his voice and noisily takes another sip of water. “It went alright?” His voice is hoarse and croaky, but he sounds exactly the same. Jesus. He sounds like every early bus call, every interview and every music video they ever did. He sounds like every time he ever murmured Niall’s name and nudged him to point out something he liked, or thought was funny, or just wanted Niall to see. So they’d have seen all the same things, so they’d lived the same life. Niall’s stomach hurts, it’s twisted up so tight.

“It went great, the nurse said,” Gemma says. Niall can imagine her smoothing back her brother’s hair. “They said they’ll keep you for a couple of days and then you can go home.”

Harry takes a shaky breath.

 “You didn’t tell me you were scared,” says Gemma. Niall hears the gentle reproach in her voice. “You should’ve said.”

“Oh,” Harry must be waving his hand. “What could you have done? I didn’t want you to worry.” He talks slower than even he normally does but he sounds okay, he sounds fine. He can talk and probably he can sing and, Niall realizes, he’s lost him.

Harry must’ve known he’d needed a surgery, and now he’s had it done, and so he must be planning to do it. Go out on his own, go solo. It was one thing when Niall meant to let Harry off the hook; it’s quite another when Harry disentangles himself and actually pulls away. It’s like. Niall licks his lips, his stomach cramping again, hard. The antiseptic smell of the hospital makes it so hard to think. Harry will have left them behind. He’ll have given up on Niall, too.

It hurts so much worse than he thought it would. Niall sets the cup down on the nearest flat surface and draws his knees up to his chest. They’ve all gone off in different directions and chances are, they’ll never work their way back to each other again. Niall saw to that when he told them that the timing wasn’t right. Maybe that’s the trick to it. The timing is never right; you just work around it.

Niall hastily wipes at his eyes and sits up. No, he knows that’s not true. There’s a difference. Between being ready and not having grown enough yet. There has to be. Otherwise, Niall fucked it all up for nothing. He scrubs his palms over his face a couple of times. He would pluck his heart right out of his chest, if he could.

Maybe the truth is, One Direction was never meant to make it. They took third on X-Factor and lasted five years longer than anyone ever expected them to and their quota of happy accidents has run dry. One Direction’s really over. Niall drops his head into his hands and counts his breaths.

He gets all the way up to four hundred and fifty-five before he feels like he can pry his face out of his hands. Then he stands up, wipes his palms on his jeans, and heads for the lift. He hails a taxi outside the hospital and asks for the nearest tattoo parlor, and he couldn’t remember for the life of him where he went, or who did the tattoo, but he crosses his ankle over his knee on the flight back to Ireland and stares at the fresh black X on his ankle like he can laser it off with his eyes.

He can’t. That’s maybe the point.

Niall goes home to Aisling’s, and the next morning he asks her to come with him to London for the recording sessions. She leans back into his hands from her seat at the kitchen table, where she’s filling out letters to remind the good townsfolk to bring their pets in for annual check-ups. “I don’t know,” she starts, hesitant. Unsure.

"Please,” Niall says. He fiddles with a lock of her hair and digs deep for something he can give her that someone else hasn’t already seen and touched and damaged. “We can have the farm after, maybe. You know. With the horses and the sheep and the chickens, but maybe not a goat. I think I’d like that, too.” It’s just that he has to finish this bit, first.

"Alright,” she says. She turns her head to kiss the back of his hand and the achey, sobbing thing in Niall’s chest takes a trembling breath.

***

Niall had a lot of amazing times with One Direction, but he thinks that recording the Moonlights’ first album might be his best memory to date. Every day brings in a new song, a new guest musician, and a whole new musical experiment. The house band – Emma, Sam, and Armand – bring the house down every time, they’re so good at jamming together now. Niall likes to think that he’s leading some of the way with the harmonica riffs he picks up and translates to other instruments, if they’re working on original material, but mostly he thinks they’re just amazing. And they are. They are.

Cian is the one who pulls Niall aside after another long day at the recording studio. Niall’s already texted Aisling to meet the band for dinner, so she’s on her way to Nando’s to meet the gang.

“Not to be rude,” says Cian, “but you’ve looked like someone put the inside of your head in a blender. Are you okay, man?”

“Yeah, of course I’m fine,” says Niall. He clears his throat and wonders what’s been giving him away. “Are you okay?”

“Actually,” Cian bites his lower lip. “The thing is, I was wondering if we were going on tour this summer. You know. So I can plan around it.”

“What have you got to plan, your next bender?” Niall asks.

Cian snorts. “No, you idiot, a wedding. Hopefully. Maybe.”

Niall’s heart stops, feels like. “You and Emma?”

“Yeah,” Cian shrugs. He starts smiling so wide it seems like it must hurt. “You know. Got a lot to account for, plus I want our honeymoon to be at least a month of just shagging and drinking and fishing. And whatever she wants to do, I’m up for whatever.”

“I’m so happy for you,” Niall says, and Cian grins. He slings an arm around Niall’s neck and pats his stomach. “I’ll ask Ed.”

“Good man,” says Cian. He drags Niall’s head down to slap a kiss on the side of his head. “Who knows, maybe you and Aisling are next, right?”

Niall brings it up with Aisling when they get home from dinner that night.

“They’re engaged?” Aisling asks. She smiles. “Good for them.”

“Do you ever think about it?” Niall asks hesitantly. Aisling has been using the time off work to catch up on backdated medical journals and a reading list a mile long. She’s brought a few of her things over for the London house and Niall realizes, in a flash, that maybe he’s looking at his future. Right here, with Aisling curled up in an armchair in front of the fire and Niall on the ottoman at her feet. “Marriage, I mean.”

Aisling puts her book down on the arm of the chair. She leaves the pages spread wide so she can pick it back up later. “In general, or marrying you?” Aisling asks. She puts her hands on the side of his face and pulls him to her, so Niall fits his knees on either side of her hips and hopes she says yes.

Aisling combs her fingers through the back of his hair and brings him down for a long, slow kiss. It feels searching, like she’s trying to kiss her way to the heart of him, see what has him in such a muddle. Niall wishes he knew himself. His ankle still stings whenever he thinks about the tattoo needle, and he hasn’t spoken to any of the boys, let alone Harry, in so long. It’s strange how once he thought he couldn’t do without them and now he has to make a note to call, to check in. They’ve drifted so far apart. This must be what it’s like to free-fall while you’re standing still.

“Be honest,” she says, and Niall nods, goes back into the kiss. Aisling very gently puts her palm over his mouth and waits for him to pull back. “I know I have to ask you things, sometimes, because you wouldn’t think to tell.”

“I’m glad you ask,” Niall says promptly. He’s figured that out, too. Just like Laura said, it’s hard for him. He’s trying so hard to work through it.

“Then answer this,” Aisling says. She touches the side of his face, and his stubble, so lightly. “Will you love me as much as you loved those boys?”

Niall catches her hand by the wrist and kisses her palm. “I love you different,” he says. “We’re a team.”

“So were they,” Aisling answers. She takes a deep breath, her eyes focused on their joined hands. “I love you more than anyone. I just want to know that you feel the same.”

“I…” Niall says. He swallows. She’s his best friend now. They spend time together every day and watch movies in bed and go to lunch with his – no, their friends, and he’s so happy to go to sleep with her and wake up beside her the next morning. Niall just hadn’t realized how smoothly time goes by. He doesn’t feel that he’s quite moved on from One Direction. More like he’s grown on it, like one of the flowers in the planter on the front porch. He didn’t realize how fully she’s become a part of his life. The knowledge blooms in his chest, as beautiful and as fragile as a flower. “I love you,” Niall says. “The whole way through.”

Aisling smiles so hard it seems like it might hurt. Niall starts kissing the new laughter lines on her face. She says, “If we’re doing this, there are going to be a few rules. I keep working no matter how much money you have,” and Niall starts nodding before she’s even done, “I keep my house in Mullingar, and someday, we get that farm we talk about. Okay?”

Niall hasn’t stopped nodding since she started talking. It all sounds so perfect. They seal the promise with a kiss.

Niall finds a ring at a pop-up market in Piccadilly Circusa, and a few weeks later, they move Aisling’s things into Niall’s London house. A few months after that, Niall goes back on tour.

***

Aisling wants to get married in the church where she was christened, her parents want them to get married in Dublin’s finest hotel, and Niall just wants to get married. Unfortunately, all of their plans fall through. They can’t get the chapel for another year yet – “And it’s already been four months planning this, Niall, I might just have to kill my own mother if we don’t sort this out soon” – and Dublin’s finest hotel is undergoing construction for the next year and a half.

“I think it’s fate,” Niall says, collapsing onto the couch on the tour bus next to her. Aisling shuffles over and tucks herself under his arm and Niall rubs her back without thinking about it. The whole lot of them are on the bus tonight, Sam and Armand and Cian and Emma, playing a hand of cards. There’s no real reason for them to be here except that this is where the rest of them are, and. Niall would never kick them out.

He presses his nose to the top of her hair and tries to do some mental math. Tour doesn’t end until the end of winter, and they’re only in the middle of the broiling summer right now. Aisling’s like Niall; once she’s decided something, she wants to do it, cold feet be damned.

“Could do LA,” he says, without really thinking. “I mean, I don’t know. Could do Mullingar, too.”

Aisling plays with the loose strings at the knees of Niall’s jeans. “That’s where your boys are,” she says. She tilts her head back onto Niall’s shoulder to look at his face. “Yeah?”

Niall nods. “It’s a nice town, though, some parts. It’d be beautiful.”

“We’d have to do it in the middle of tour,” Aisling observes. They have maybe two days off between the LA gigs in late October and the Berkeley shows.

“Could be on honeymoon the rest of the tour,” Niall suggests, and Aisling laughs.

"Not on this tour bus,” she says, and kisses the underside of his jaw.

Niall laughs. “So, we’ll splurge on hotel rooms?”

Aisling wriggles out from under Niall’s arm and ruffles his hair. She insinuates herself into the game with total ease, and Niall watches her, happy. Happy.

He rings Louis a couple of weeks later, when the band boards the plane from Europe to America, because he reckons that gives Louis enough time to be late to everything.

“Louis,” Niall says, seriously as he can manage.

“Oh, God,” says Louis. “Where do you need me to bail you out of jail from?”

Niall laughs. “It’s not that, you wanker. Want to be a groomsman? I’m getting married.”

“No,” says Louis. “I want to be best man.”

“Okay,” says Niall. He clears his throat. “Hey, Lou.”

“What?” Louis asks, sounding irretrievably pleased.

Niall says, “I really missed you.”

Louis laughs. “Of course you did.”

“Can you call Liam for me? I want to have your boys’ suits fitted soon as we can, and I know you two use the same tailor.”

“Eh,” Louis says. “We don’t, so much, anymore. Sorry, Nialler, I have to run. Call him yourself, aye? Thanks, lad!” He rings off.

Niall gives his phone a wary look and calls Liam. Emma snores on Niall’s shoulder and across the aisle, Cian is drooling all over Armand’s t-shirt. Sam keeps taking pictures of them. Hilarious. “Boy!” Liam answers.

“No, that’s you,” says Niall. “Did you and Louis have a falling-out?”

Liam laughs again, this time nervously. “Nialler, to what do I owe this pleasure?”

Niall chews on his bottom lip. He hasn’t been in touch with the other lads much but he knows that Liam and Cheryl broke up, and he doesn’t want to rub anything in Liam’s face, because he knows how badly Liam’s wanted someone by his side forever, always. When Niall and Aisling first started dating, Niall had thought of that. That he finally had someone to text between stops on tour and the moment Cian woke him up for bus call, someone to call home to whether a gig went amazingly well or pretty shitting bad.

“Gettin’ married,” Niall answers.

“Oh, God,” says Liam. “Let me be a groomsman.”

Niall laughs. His eyes ache so hard, he must have allergies on this plane. Liam sounds exactly like the boy who shared a room with Niall when he was just sixteen, and they liked each other even though they were each others’ competition yet. Niall remembers Liam asking him if he was really not nervous at all, and Niall had shown him his fingernails all chewed to bits. Liam loosened up, some, after that. He shows Liam his fingernails again, metaphorically speaking. “Louis’s my best man but you can be my best man, too, alright? In case she doesn’t show up or I lose the ring, or,” Niall laughs anxiously.

“I can be Daddy Direction one more time,” Liam says gently.

Niall’s family already knows, too, so the only person left to tell personally before they send out the invitations is Harry. Niall would be lying if he said he wasn’t putting it off. He has been. Harry sent him a Christmas card this year that only read, “Wishing you and your significant other a very happy holiday. X.”

So he puts it off, till finally Niall can’t put it off anymore. He’s sat at a café table in the little patisserie connected to the hotel he and the band are staying at in New Orleans. The café isn’t open yet, so it’s just Niall himself and the pearly gray predawn light. He clears his throat and dials Harry’s number.

Harry answers sounding relaxed and sleepy, the way he always does after yoga and his first cup of coffee. Niall swallows hard. “Harry. Hey, it’s – it’s Niall.”

“Niall,” Harry repeats slowly. “Hello.”

If Niall doesn’t close his eyes, he can’t imagine Harry’s face when Niall started pulling him off. He doesn’t want to think about Harry’s lips kiss-red and his eyes glazed, soft, the way they are when he’s not making himself hard of heart. “I didn’t mean to – I didn’t want to, like, surprise you. Sorry.”

“Do you want to hang up and call me back tomorrow?” Harry asks.

“Is that what you want me to do?” Niall asks.

Harry breathes shallowly. “No,” says Harry. “No, we can talk. I miss – uh, haven’t heard your voice in a while, I mean. It’s nice.” He clears his throat. “You sound good.”

“Thanks.” Niall laughs quiet, so as not to disturb all the people sleeping in this morning. His own band is still presumably in their hotel rooms upstairs recovering from Emma’s and Cian’s wedding. They’d gotten it done in a little chapel just up the road and bar-hopped as a celebration afterwards. A parade swooped down the cobbled street between here and there and got them all cripplingly drunk. Niall stayed up to FaceTime with Aisling, but she must’ve been at work, because she didn’t answer. So he’d finally called Harry. “We’ve got about five albums’ worth of my voice you can listen to.”

“Please,” huffs Harry. “They hardly let you sing on the first one.”

Niall just hums. “We had you,” he says.

Harry clears his throat. Niall can picture him sat on his sofa in his flat in New York, Rumour probably stretched out on the couch beside him. Knowing Harry, he’s probably having a bowl of organic blueberry oatmeal with cinnamon sugar and a dollop of yogurt. Niall can smell it now, and he doesn’t quite miss Harry, in the sense that he’d go back to those weeks in Harry’s house in LA if he could. More like he’d be there now, sat up at Harry’s bar and waiting for his eggs to finish frying. He’d even like for Harry to be sat here at the table beside him now, calmly slurping on an espresso and reading crossword clues out loud to make doing the paper a group activity. Niall doesn’t know what the word for that is.

“So,” says Harry. “Erm, Gemma got married.”

Niall starts picking at his fingernails. “I heard,” he says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it.”

“That’s alright,” says Harry. “They were proper disgusting, I’m still recovering, actually.”

Niall laughs. “Did you catch the bouquet?”

“No,” says Harry darkly. “Nana pushed me out of the way.”

“Yikes,” Niall says mildly. He can just picture it, though, Harry stretched up on his tiptoes and his bumbling legs knocked askew when some little old lady elbowed him in the gut. Harry probably spent the rest of the wedding doubled over in pretend agony, a smile on his face every time someone looked at him. “Um, listen, before – before we get too off-topic, or what have you. Do you. I, um. You can.”

"Words, Niall,” Harry says, in his most annoying voice. “Use them.”

“You can catch the bouquet at my wedding. I’ll help rig it.”

Harry’s voice comes back without all of the easy warmth it’d just had. “What?”

“I’m getting married,” Niall says. He starts chewing the inside of his cheek, even though Aisling can feel it when they kiss, and he knows it worries her.  “I want you to come to the wedding.”

Desperately, Harry says, “You’re sure that’s a good idea? What with – us?”

Niall puts the phone on the table and puts his face down on top of it. He knots his fingers together between his knees. “I told her that it wasn’t real. That it was just pretend.” He waits for Harry to say something, anything.

“Maybe,” Harry almost whispers. “I’ll have to check my schedule.”

Niall takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “I know it’s a lot to ask,” he says. He tries so hard not hear how small his voice is. “But you’re my best friend. I want my best friend to be there.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to cry the whole time,” Harry says, and he needn’t have worried. Niall feels like crying right then.

Niall takes a sharp breath. “Oh, Harry,” he mumbles. “I thought you’d started to move on, too.”

Harry sniffles as quietly as he can. “Okay,” he says, “No, no, no, it’s okay. I’m coming, I’ll come. When is it? I’ll mark it down now so I’ll be sure to have the time off.”

“You really don’t have to,” Niall says, much too late. Part of him wonders whether he’d have put off telling Harry and getting married forever if it meant he didn’t have to listen to Harry fighting tears like this. “If it’d be too hard for you, Harry.” Part of him wonders if it wouldn’t be too hard for himself now, too.

“It’s just,” Harry whispers. If Niall concentrates very, very hard he can almost hear the words Harry’s not saying. Something about how he would’ve waited. Niall would have, too, and maybe they never would’ve gotten it right. Something like One Direction only happens once in a lifetime. They were lucky enough for that.

Asking for more feels like too much, now. And Harry would be such a good husband, and a good dad. He’s wasted on Niall. Niall presses his cheek against the table, looking at his phone next to him as though it’s Harry next to him in bed, and he’s trying to shove his head under Niall’s armpit and lick the side of his ribs, crawl under his back when they got to a scary part in Evil Dead. He used to wake Niall up coming home from his midnight runs every night without fail, and Niall never let on that Harry woke him. He was too busy wondering whether Harry would come back, and then he’d slide beneath the covers and curl up as close to Niall’s chest as he dared. Niall’s got to learn to stop hoping that Harry will come back.

“I know,” says Niall. “Someday, maybe,” he says, because – because he can’t not. He’s still Niall. He still can’t bear for Harry to think he’s stopped loving him. That’d never happen.

Harry exhales noisily and promptly hangs up, and Niall leaves his face down on the warming tabletop until he thinks he won’t actually die, although in some ways that’d be a small comfort. Niall wipes his face with his sleeve and watches a mother pull her child up the street, two young blokes go by with Starbucks paper sleeves in their hands. The world doesn’t end.

Sam and his daughters and Emma are already in Niall’s and Aisling’s hotel room when he gets in. Both girls let out shrill little screams and he lets them tackle him to the floor, carrying on about how they’ve broken both his bad knees. Sam pulls him up with a smile on his face, and Aisling hands him the plastic bag to make coffee on the hotel coffeepot, and life goes on.

***

The morning of Niall’s wedding dawns cold and gray. A thick layer of red and orange and gold leaves coats the earth still as autumn gives way to winter and the days turn steadily colder, even in LA. Niall’s already driven himself and Theo to pick up their suits and the ladies’ bouquets from the florist. They’re running about fifteen minutes early, so Niall lets Theo sit in his lap and steer the wheel while a Springsteen song plays over the radio.

Liam and Louis arrive about half an hour later, Louis from his house, Liam from a hotel. They hug when Louis strolls in, his hair a mess, and it seems awkward and a little stiff. They loosen up when Niall steps forward to give them both a hug.

They go off to see to their duties as ushers while Niall fidgets and waits in the apse behind the altar. This must’ve been a Catholic church at one point, but now it’s more of your general holy place. Niall doesn’t mind. He thinks he empathizes.

Bobby’s sat on the edge of an aged pew while Theo kicks his heels next to him. Niall’s holding off on giving the little ring bearer his ring until the very last minute, and even then, he’s asked Denise about taping the box to the baby’s hand. Denise said no, but she’s never said no to Niall using a rubber band either, so.

“Son,” says Bobby, so Niall goes over and perches on a heap of tatty old Bibles beside him. “Are you nervous?”

“No,” Niall says. He can’t stop running his sweaty palms over his suit trousers and he thinks his tie might be strangling him, but no. He’s not nervous. All he has to do is think about Aisling in her wedding dress walking up the aisle to him and he’s okay. He can breathe. “I’m fine, Bob. I promise.”

“I’m right proud of you,” Bobby says, so Niall forces a smile. He thinks he might throw up. All this waiting is shredding his nerves. “No matter what you do, or who you love. I’ll always love you.”

Niall lifts a hand. He’s not quite sure what to do with it, so he puts it back down on his knee. “I love you, too, Pop.”

“You’re awful lucky to have found the love of your life, young as you are,” says Bobby.

Niall just nods.

“I never regretted being married to your mother, because I got you boys out of it,” Bobby goes on, and Niall begins to get an idea of where this is going. 

“You know, sometimes people want to look back and pick out the mistakes in their lives, but I think that’s. There’s no such thing as a mistake, in my opinion,” Bobby coughs, shifts his weight around in his seat. “There’s just _is_ and _could have been_ , and I hope you have both. Yeah?”

Niall puts his hand on his dad’s shoulder. “Yeah, Bob,” he coughs. “I get you.”

The closer and closer the clock ticks down to the actual ceremony and ring exchanging and the vows, the more nervous Niall gets. He keeps pacing back and forth in this tiny little room behind the altar while his groomsmen trade jokes and a silver flask they probably think Niall hasn’t seen. This _is_ an Irish wedding, for all that it’s in California. It’s not official until someone’s puked in the bushes, someone’s hooked up in the coat closet, and someone’s thrown a punch. Niall’s already seen Aisling’s dad bent double in the shrubbery outside, so at least that’s that one off the list.

Liam and Louis crowd around Niall with their arms linked together around the back of his neck, so they form up in a little huddle like this is 2015 and they’re about to rock on to stage together. Niall closes his eyes and gives himself up to the magic of it one last time. To being one of them, and not only himself. Funny how he almost forgot what it was like to be plugged into something that made him more than himself.

Then he thinks about how Zayn isn’t with them, and how Harry’s probably sat outside on one of the pews, unwilling to have a chat with Niall before the ceremony, if at all, and. And he understands why they’d feel like letting the band go was their only means of salvaging themselves. Niall knows he’s made the right choice by voting against them coming back together. Not yet, maybe not ever. Even if he feels a little like crying.

“Well,” says Louis.

“Hey,” says Liam, so Niall opens his eyes and look round to him. “Glad you got here first, mate,” says Liam. “You’ll be right good at this, I bet.”

Niall gives Liam a smile. “You will be, too.”

Liam nods. “Just got to get there my own way, first. Right?”

Niall nods. He knows what Liam’s trying to say. “We got our own roads to ride and chances we gotta take.”

Louis cocks his head. His hand tightens on Niall’s side. “That was nice.”

“Springsteen,” Niall says.

Louis laughs and holds Niall tighter till they’re not huddled up, they’re just hugging. And it’s not like they’re breaking that promise they made all the way back at the start of the band, the one about going all the way together or not at all. Hopefully they’re heading to the same place, they’re just getting there each his own way. And maybe they’ll get the timing right again someday.

“Love you boys,” says Niall. Behind them is his new band, Sam and Armand and Cian all wearing the same charcoal gray suits that Niall and Aisling picked out for the groomsmen. They were there for this part of Niall’s life, just like Liam and Louis were there for a different part. He’s so grateful for them all.

Outside, the music changes, and Louis claps Niall on the shoulder, says, “That’s our cue. See you out there, big man.”

Niall finds Harry in the crowd before Aisling appears walking down the aisle and Niall’s eyes shift to her. Harry’s hair curls gently at the tops of his shoulders and his face is tanned and smooth and as yet unlined; he looks impossibly young, and somehow so much older than Niall remembers. He smiles at Niall and nods his head, and Niall’s hands stop trembling at his sides. Niall will always be in love with him. He’s always known that. But he can’t make Harry any happier by loving him, not when they can’t make it work. He hopes Harry knows that, deep down where Harry’s always been the smartest of them.

Then Aisling turns the corner, and Niall looks away, and then he’s married.

If they thought that having the wedding outside of Ireland would help with keeping half the population of Ireland from showing up, they were dead wrong. At least half of the musicians the Moonlights ever collaborated with are there, along with their spouse and children, and Niall’s entire family, and One Direction’s old team, and Louis and his tribe, and most of the LIC. It’s an Irish wedding, alright, whether in Ireland or no.

The reception is held out back of the chapel in an old farmhouse that they renovated to have real-life horses and chickens and goats for the kids to pet, although Niall’s already spotted Eoghan attempting to drunkenly ride the bored-looking mare chewing a mouthful of hay. Niall wipes his sweating palms on his thin suit trousers when it’s time for his and Aisling’s first dance, and true to form, she leads him out to the dance floor.

“I should’ve warned you about this before you married me,” says Niall, when Aisling takes his hand. Niall smooths his other hand down her back, the lacy fabric of her dress feeling so delicate and ornate.

Aisling snorts and leans into him. “Yep, that’s a deal-breaker,” she says. She leads Niall in a slow, careful waltz in the middle of the dance floor. This spotlight is so intimidating where the ones onstage have become such good friends in time. “Can’t dance, can’t fry an egg without breaking the yolk.”

Niall huffs. “I’m pretty functional for a former child star, you know. I mean, I’m no Britney Spears,” he laughs.

“That’s true.” Aisling hands slides a little lower down Niall’s back, dangerously near his bum. The distance and time apart is maybe harder on her than it is on him, because he’s grown up so used to it. He comes home or she visits him on tour and it’s like they’re meeting for the first time all over again, sometimes. “You can grill a mean steak. Probably can’t say that for Britney.”

“I love you,” Niall tells her. “Just, you know, in case the getting married thing didn’t say it. And your cold toes, and the fact that you’re going to make me help you get pissed and try to steal a chicken later tonight.”

Aisling smiles up at him, her fingers playing through the back of his hair. They’re hardly dancing at all anymore, just swaying on the spot while Patty Smyth sings about “ _But like a fool I keep losing my place / and I keep seeing you walk through that door._ ” Niall leads her into another slow, careful twirl. She’s his someone to come home to. She turns neatly back into his arms, and even though Niall can feel Harry’s arms on him, he knows she’s there to stay.

“What a coincidence,” says Aisling, resting her cheek against his chest, over his heart. “I love you, too.”

As far as first dances go, it’s not an impressive thing. But they manage not to fall over, and that’s the main thing.

Harry manages to successfully avoid talking to Niall even while he’s standing in front of him saying, “It was a lovely ceremony and I’m very happy for you, I left the gift receipt inside the card in case you don’t like the gift,” because there’s a hundred other people behind him prepared to say more or less the same thing.

And it just. Niall’s married now and One Direction was a part of his life and will always be a part of him, so even though he’s closed that chapter, he still loved it. Still loved Harry. That’ll always matter.

Niall can’t find Harry in the tangle of people dancing in the middle of the dance floor to Sam and Armand and Emma jamming out onstage in their finery with anyone who wants to join them, or in the gaggle of people just off side, or at the array of round tables where waiters and waitresses are still going round and collecting dinner plates. Niall picks up Harry’s name card at his seat at a table with Niall’s nan and the cousins Niall knows Harry likes best.

Niall watched him make polite conversation with the other wedding guests and twirl Maura for a dance, shove his curly head under Bobby’s chin when Bobby sat next to him for a round of drinks. Niall doesn’t miss dreaming about Harry every night, exactly, or waking up in a pool of his own sweat with his heart going a mile a minute. It’s more the other thing, the word he could never quite find. The word for having him there if he could, the way Niall remembers him.

He catches up to Harry right as Harry’s sliding behind the wheel of his fancy white vintage car, the one he’s got two versions of for each side of the world he usually lives on. Niall puts his hand inside the open window like a complete idiot just to make sure Harry won’t peel out and pretend he didn’t see Niall.

Niall clears his throat and bends down to see through the window. Harry offers him a tense smile, and Niall knows the look on his face, like he’s only just not crying. All the parts of Niall that are long-ingrained habit say, Soothe him, hug him, hold him close. Niall can see his lanky body curved over the steering wheel, and he flashes back to a slightly younger, scruffier Harry with two days’ worth of road on him, every line of his body shouting _I’ll be ready I’ll be ready I’ll be ready._ Niall remembers the way his steps would falter right before he came into his bedroom like he was afraid Niall wouldn’t be there, a self-conscious smile on his face praying _Wait for me wait for me wait for me._

“It’s still you,” Niall says. Harry squeezes the steering wheel and gives Niall a quizzical look, and Niall can’t help himself for knowing he’s broken both their hearts. Even if it was for the better. He clears his throat. “When we were on stage every night and we were just trying to make each other laugh, or going round trying to be tourists, or playing golf in our hotel rooms to pass the time. I wouldn’t have done any of that with anyone else. It wouldn’t have been what it was without you.” Niall swallows hard. Harry’s knuckles have gone white around the steering wheel with the effort not to cry. Niall knows. “It’ll still be you, for me, till – till –”

“Forever,” says Harry. “Just say forever, Niall. Please.”

“Forever,” Niall murmurs.

Harry glances into Niall’s eyes for one bare second, and then he nods and clenches his jaw, so Niall backs off. Harry twists the keys in the ignition and Niall doesn’t say anything when he pulls out of the driveway. He watches till Harry’s taillights disappear into the dark, and then he goes inside to negotiate his wife down from trying to sneak a baby cow into the limo with them for their honeymoon.

And life goes on.

***

The Moonlights’ first album drops on last date of their second tour. The band’s nonstop touring schedule wore them all down in different ways; Sam stopped shaving, Armand could be heard humming to himself at all hours of the day, and Emma became irritable.

“I’m not irritable,” she tells Niall, cross, the morning of that last show. They’re gathered around a table at IHOP for pancakes and sausage before a run of radio interviews to promote the album. “I’m pregnant.”

To which Niall responded by promptly choking on a bite of egg. Armand thumped him on the back so hard that he almost face-planted into his pancakes. Niall knows, has known, that the band would need a break sooner or later. They’ve been touring without a break for two years now; that’d wear anyone down. It’s just that now he has to figure out what to do next. They could do a short run of gigs and call it a tour just to promote the album, then go into the studio to produce another album. Or they could drop this album cold with the promise of coming back later to tour it. Niall tries, unsuccessfully, not to think of the lyrics “ _The fact that we can sit right here and say goodbye means we’ve already won,_ ” because they did. Just, it’d be nice to win another one, sometimes.

Sam shakes his head at Niall and adds more pepper to his omelet. “You’re a rolling stone if ever I’ve met one, boss.”

Niall shrugs. He calls Aisling that night to see what he should do. “Come home,” she says immediately. “I can’t even remember the last time I saw your face in person, do you know that?”

“Well,” Niall says. It has been a while. Too long, maybe. Maybe it’s because last time he left home, everyone still felt the same when he went back, but he’s always thrown when he goes home and Aisling’s done her hair different and rearranged the house and stopped liking American cheese and only liking mozzarella. It’s silly stuff like that he always knew happened, distantly, but he didn’t realize how much it’d affect things.

He can’t pick up her regular for her at Nando’s on the way home because he doesn’t know it anymore. He can’t surprise her with breakfast in bed because he didn’t know she was trying out a wheat-free diet. They can’t even talk about books because Niall’s spent all that time on the road playing gigs and learning how to play music and drinking pints with his mates at the pub after, and it’s like a dream come true, to have both. To be the Niall he is on stage, and the Niall he is at home, and for those things not to be in conflict with each other.

But it’s not a dream. And those things don’t come back easy.

“I remember that being so much easier last time I was home,” Niall says, one of his first nights back. Aisling invited her friends from the neighborhood over for dinner and they’d played charades after, and try as he might, Niall couldn’t figure out what her hand motions meant. Turned out she was flipping pancakes in a frying pan.

“It’s not your fault,” Aisling says. She tucks a flyaway hair behind her ear and looks at Niall under the warm kitchen lights, up to her elbows at the sink. She looks so beautiful and textured and real, someone Niall has known intimately and loved so hard, and somehow stranger.

She’s different, Niall realizes. Grown-up. Older.

Somehow his new resolution to spend as much time at home as possible only seems to make things worse. She can’t read with him constantly fussing with his guitar strings, and she doesn’t like doing crossword puzzles together because Niall’s not a very good speller.

“I didn’t mean that,” she says, when Niall snaps his mouth shut and goes back to watching golf highlights on his phone. “I don’t know why this isn’t easy anymore,” she admits, finally.

So that’s why they start seeing a relationship counselor. They just got out of step, Niall thinks, like dancing. They just need to start over in the same tempo.

“Maybe it’s just that we want such different things,” Aisling says. Niall pulls the car up to the speaker and relays their Starbucks order to the barista.

“What do you mean?” Niall asks. He leaves the window rolled down. It’s a lovely day for London in late July. The sun is struggling to break out from behind the clouds, and Emma texted him a picture of her newborn baby this morning, the top of Cian’s head in the picture and tears streaming from his eyes. Niall’s already made about four tweets about them. He can’t help himself, he’s so happy. “Is this about the farm?”

“Yeah,” Aisling shrugs. “You know, all of that. You know I’m not from the city. I miss green. And the hills. And Ireland. I miss Ireland.”

“All my work is here,” Niall says slowly. His whole world. Sam and Armand and Emma are all here, and Cian, and Liam, too. Mark, who he trains with whenever he’s home, and some of the security guys from the One Direction days. So many musicians from Moonlight tours. His whole world is here, plus or minus a few.

Aisling puts her hand on Niall’s arm. Her skin is still soft and warm, and she still smells so good all the time, like flowery perfume. Niall finds himself sliding down that ledge, a little bit, toward doing whatever she asks. If it makes her happy. “Our families are there.”

Niall’s stomach sinks. “You mean Mullingar. You want to move home?”

“Maybe not now,” Aisling bites her lip. She’s put blond highlights in her hair and even though it’s just done up in a sloppy knot, she still looks beautiful. She looks like so many sleepless nights he spent on the tour bus talking to her instead of getting some rest, and the many nights he’d been home and they’d rolled around in bed, and every day in between. “I was thinking, maybe a year?”

And, “I can’t do it,” Niall says. A lot of things, so so many things, can change in a year. Niall knows this intimately. But he also knows that some things don’t change. That he’ll still want to be in a band, that he’ll still want to be friends with the people he’s friends with. That he’ll still want to step out in front of an audience of a hundred people, a thousand, forty thousand, because that’s just part of who he is. He thought she knew that, is all. “I mean, not that soon.”

Aisling props her elbow up on the windowsill and looks at him. Not even Harry saw him so clearly, Niall thinks. Like she’s lived inside his skin, inside his heart. The wedding ring on his left hand catches the light and Niall quietly curls his hand into a fist so as not to let anybody take it away. The line slowly pulls forward and Niall pays for their coffee. He pulls them out into traffic and part of him, dimly, thinks that this probably isn’t the best time for this conversation. There just never seems to be a good time. Maybe he’s just a little bit out of time with the universe. Maybe that’s all on him.

“I just want our futures to have each other in them,” Aisling says softly. “That’s all.”

So Niall tries. He always tries.

***

Niall’s browsing for something to get Theo for his fifth birthday when he stumbles upon Harry’s book of photographs. He waited too long to find something for the little lad so now he’s snuck out while Aisling settles them into Denise’s and Greg’s guest room to buy him a present. It’s not that he forgot, or that he didn’t care, it’s that he was waiting to see if he already had the Aquaman Lego Adventure Expansion Pack. He did, so that’s why Niall’s wandering around Mullingar’s tiny strip mall looking for something else.

Five year-olds read, Niall knows, and who knows? Maybe he can find this generation’s Harry Potter for the baby, or something, something that’ll change his whole world. Aisling’s always on about how books totally change her life, like, every other week, so there must be something to it.

Harry’s book has a whole table and a cardboard display. The pictures look vaguely familiar in the sense that Harry made Niall look at his pictures before he posted them to Insta or Twitter for ages when they were young, and Niall remembers what looks Harry prefers. His aesthetics. He couldn’t forget it if he wanted. Niall tucks the book under his arm and buys a copy of it, as well as the first Harry Potter novel, without thinking.

He flips through the book sat in his car in the car park while Denise and Aisling finish cooking dinner at home. Niall reckons he has about ten minutes before he needs to get back and help with the salad, or something. Harry’s pictures are everything Niall ever loved about him, in book form. He’s taken pictures of street signs and puddles in the forest and the dancing laughter in Gemma’s face when she’s sat at Anne’s kitchen table with him. Harry’s even released some of the band’s old photos; it’s a shock to Niall to see Louis with suspenders cutting into his shoulders, his head tucked in close to Zayn’s, Zayn’s face soft and lax with sleep. Niall touches the page and feels a little as though he might be able to touch his friends’ faces, and their joy, through the page. He’s so much older now it hurts.

“Let’s have a baby,” Niall says, when he gets in. He ducks his head in close to Aisling’s in the corner of the kitchen where she’s fetching silverware from the drawer. “We could start a family.”

Aisling clutches the forks and table knives to her chest and looks up at him with an inscrutable expression on her face. “Let’s talk about this later,” she says, so Niall waits. He leans across the foot of Denise’s guest bed and picks at the duvet cover, looking up at her sitting crisscross-applesauce with her back leaned against the headboard.

Niall starts talking because Aisling won’t. “We could, you know. I don’t have to go back on tour – ever, if I want, but we could even scrap the one we have scheduled for next summer. And I know – I know how to be around kids, I wouldn’t not be there, you know?” He swallows. “I’d be a good dad.”

Aisling crawls down the bed and cradles Niall’s face between her hands. “I know that, of course I know that.”

“So yes?” Niall asks.

Aisling bites her lip. “Niall,” she starts gently.

“What?” Niall asks, not least exasperated. And mostly afraid.

Aisling presses her forehead against his and lets the tears roll down her cheeks. Niall always feels worse for making other people feel worse. He feels like worse than rubbish, right now. “Let’s wait,” she says. “Let’s go home, and try and make it work, and if we can’t – if we aren’t.”

Niall shakes his head. His brow furrows, and he knows Aisling feels it, because she presses the soft smooth palms of her hands to the bristles on Niall’s jaw. “I’m the same person you married,” he says. “I’m the same.”

“But you’re not,” says Aisling. “You’re more yourself than ever you were.” She shrugs helplessly. "And I'm more me." 

Niall closes his eyes. It’s an impossible thing to come to terms with, the person you love telling you they love you differently. That you’re not quite what they expected, or want. Niall’s loved being married, is the thing. A husband. And having someone to think about and call home to and buy anniversary and Valentine’s gifts for. But it’s not quite that simple, really. Everything that starts out easy and uncomplicated gets more complicated the more love you add. There’s so much more at stake. More to lose, and more to gain. Niall should’ve learned that lesson by now.

Niall closes his eyes and leans into her palm. "I do really, really love you," he says. 

And Aisling leans forward and kisses his forehead. "I love you, too," she says gently. 

So they go home to London and Niall starts work on the Moonlights’ third tour and they make plans for a live recording of the bands’ setlist while they’re live on tour, and Niall and Aisling drift steadily further and further apart. Aisling will say she knew it was over when he stopped bringing his Air and Space and Gibson Music magazines into the house because he preferred to read them at the studio; Niall reckons it was when they stopped seeing the counselor.

Either way, it ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper, as the story goes. Niall comes home from studio time with Cian and the lads and Emma and their beautiful new baby who keeps chewing on mic wires to find a note on the kitchen table.

 _Goodbye – Love, Ais_ , is all she’s written.

Maybe, Niall thinks, that’s all there was left to say.

Niall’s more himself than he ever was. So he does what Niall does, and he chases the music. And the band goes back on tour.  

***

He dreams of Harry again. Harry happy, the way Niall always wanted to remember him, baby-faced and irretrievably young, at Niall’s house in Ireland. Before they were ever even a band, before anything else got in the way of them being friends. Before friends was more complicated than a handful of kids loving each other really, really hard. Before Niall loved Harry special, in addition to that.

Harry loved Ireland in a way unique, usually, to the Irish. He spent all weekend tagging along at Niall’s back and smiling at him from his seat in the train carriage. Already Niall could imagine they’d grow up together, one way or another.

Mostly Niall dreams of Harry’s head tucked in close to his on the flimsy pillow in his tiny bedroom in the house where he grew up. “Someday, maybe,” Niall told him, “when we’re ready.”

Harry’s soft dry lips pressed against his in a sweet kiss. They were so innocent then. “It’s going to be so great,” Harry said, all sixteen years old and enthusiastic and afraid of nothing.

“The best,” Niall agreed.

***

The thing about it, Niall reckons, is that he’s loved doing shows since before any of this ever happened. Since before Aisling and the Moonlights, since before even Harry and One Direction. Niall remembers loving music with his whole backwards inside-out heart since he was big enough to peer through the fence at The Stables and wish he was big enough to go in. He remembers sneaking in, since he couldn’t wait to be big enough. Niall remembers his nan playing Fleetwood Mac records so that he could hear them from the front garden while she made him shuck peas or peel potatoes, and he remembers Greg pressing the side of his head to Niall’s so that they could both listen to Thin Lizzy on his Walkman while their parents argued in the other room.

A love like that never really leaves you.

Maybe that’s why he’s not surprised when he feels a familiar pair of eyes on him at one show at the Odeon. He’s just happy. It’s not simple, or uncomplicated. It’s the most complicated thing in the world. But when Liam and Harry find him backstage after the show, Niall doesn’t have to think twice, or even once, before he says yes to One Direction again, and everything that comes with it. Some things are worth everything.


End file.
